


faun

by annnubis



Series: in the shallows [1]
Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: Body Horror, F/M, Psychological Torture, in any way that isn't, john is fixated and unable to communicate, rook is thoughtful, wayyyy too much
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2020-11-01 06:50:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 36,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20810873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/annnubis/pseuds/annnubis
Summary: There is no quick escape from John's bunker. Rook has little to bargain with but herself, but luckily that's what he's most interested in.





	1. the mask that burns like a violin

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter titles are from Carnival by Rebecca Lindenberg.
> 
> Another note--One Thousand and One Nights is a classic book of Middle Eastern folk tales. It's a frame story where our protagonist Scheherazade must tell tales to her new husband King Shahryār because otherwise he will behead her just like all his previous wives. She becomes the first wife he doesn't kill because of her cleverness at storytelling. Fitting, really. So Rook is making a really dark literary joke--and to her surprise, John picks up on it.

The worst part of captivity was the lack of fresh air. Rook thought the memory of it tickled her nose sometimes, when her eyes were closed and her head leaned back against the chair she was tied to and the blood and tears rapidly dried on her skin. 

There was no air circulation in John's bunker, no cry of lark or whippoorwill that she’d tuck inside her heart like good luck charms as she infiltrated outpost after outpost, dodging bullets and washing the grass in Peggys’ finest red. 

Like most things, they were distant memories. But she’d discovered her extraordinary propensity to cling to them, get lost in sensory-bound sensations of long days of wild brush and stone paths when animals prowled beside her as her companions.

A hand was patting her cheek lightly, soft as the dry press of a mouth at a family reunion. She knew that palm and those thick fingers like she knew the smell of her parents’ home when she opened the door. Knew it the way she knew the burn of brewed coffee scalding the roof of her mouth. 

It could have been almost dear, if it wasn’t so mercurial. The patting turned into one, firm slap. It stung the crest of her cheekbone. Once a upon a time, she could remember applying highlighter to the same spot with an angled brush and her favorite perfume shimmering in the air like glitter. 

“Oh, no, no, no,” a smooth, playful voice crooned, “No, that won’t do. We cannot just have you dissociating, young lady, otherwise there’s no reason for either of us to be here. We must work together _ with purpose_.”

Her sore head lolled to one side as her brown eyes flicked from the rusty wall on which it had been locked and onto his terribly blue eyes. She smelled her own sour sweat like a filthy cloud clinging to her. The air was so stale and hot that she felt her lungs seize. 

How could he stand it, being surrounded by the stench of her? But he did, pristine in his long sleeves and buttoned vest, seemingly unbothered by anything until he slammed his fist on the table. At least he got to bathe after their sessions.

“Let me brush my teeth,” she murmured to him instead of acknowledging his bullshit. She was past the point of begging or trying to hide. Her mouth smelled so bad it was giving her a headache. She just wanted to be clean.

“It must be uncomfortable,” commiserated the Baptist, twinkling eyes and lean corded forearms flexing and strong aquiline nose making him look as distant and compelling as a Roman statue, “Becoming as dirty on the outside as you are on the inside.”

He’d been excited at her arrival, she could tell. He'd been wanting to punish her for weeks before her capture when she'd begun liberating gas stations and pumpkin patches. He wanted to crush her. He wanted everything he'd told her would happen on the radio; to confess to him. To submit to him. It was about this--the scratchy rasp of her voice rubbing painfully against her parched throat, her collarbones sharp against his dragging touch, her gaze inches away from his as he forced her to look at him.

She ran her tongue over her bottom lip as he watched her intensely, “I think that you would love for me to believe that.”

“The truth, you mean?” he laughed and it was thin as a blade, “Yes, of course, I want a lamb of mine to understand the truth. You’ve been living under the delusion that you are on the just side of this war.”

She smiled at him. Faint as it was, he caught her reaction and he lunged at her, grabbing her by her thin, broad shoulders and shaking. Tears welled in her swollen eyes as her smile grew and it felt like something was rattling in her head.

He growled, “What is so funny, child? Do tell. That’s why you’re here after all. You and I, we need to talk to each other. My feelings are starting to get hurt because you _never_ spill the beans. But maybe all you are is a tool to be controlled. Maybe I should find your masters instead.”

His aggressiveness was something that had taken her aback at first because he always breached the invisible line between them. As a police officer, a perp rarely if ever put hands on her. In her life before all this, no one spoke in this easy violence. But he crowded her in and snarled in her ear and gripped her hair in his hand to turn her head in his direction if she tried to avert her gaze.

In his taunting, John tripped over a memory of her old life, of her fiery mother and her opinion of men who thought they could yell at her. The way she could stare incredulous daggers at men who just didn't realize she could obliterate them with a word. God, she missed her.

She remembered again--the days were drifting and she was beginning to forget herself and then remember with a flood of nectarous warmth the things which had made her strong and sturdy. Her life before Hope. Her mom.

“My mother,” she began after he released her and the room sloshed around her vision like water, “would have said that you aren’t worth the spit in my mouth. And she’d have been right.”

He socked her in the mouth, a glancing blow but it hurt all the same and split her top lip open on one of her canines. He made her feel like a balloon, always on the verge of popping, but never quite finishing the job. 

“Was your mother a murderous whore like you?”

“No, but I think she’d have laughed in your face if you called her that.”

“And what about you, deputy, what about what _ you _ think when I call you a murderous whore? You realize that’s all you are, don’t you? The Father may see something in you, but all I see are holes and good aim,” he insulted her, crude and clear. 

His eyes were lit up like a zealot’s and he seemed to vibrate like he was plugged straight into an electrical socket, nearby but out of sight.

“I would say you were intimidated by women,” Rook said around a tongue made rubber by swelling and saliva and blood, “Has anyone ever told you what a drama queen you are, John?”

John looked contemplative. She found it unwillingly fascinating, how when she thought she'd found a button to press and he just might lose it--that was usually the moment he reeled all that passion and fury back in. He was listening to her, she realized. At some point, he’d begun listening.

“You say my name often,” he said thoughtfully, “But I can’t use yours back. I need you to give it to me, deputy. You’re like a changeling dropped into a crib, growing and vicious and deceitful, and I can’t have power over you until I own your name. Give it to me.”

He sounded serious. He sounded like he wanted a scrap of information from her without admitting that he would bargain for it.

“Let me brush my teeth,” she whispered to him, saw him still with her offer, “Let me wash my face. And I’ll tell you.”

John Seed stared at her with his new moon eyes, pure dark pupils that were liquid as well water. 

He believed this was her first moment of shatter, she thought, one he must have seen a million times before. He thought he was picking the lock to her, thought he could steal from her those shadowy unspoken words that she wedged between them when he talked to her and hurt her and left her in the dark.

But it was a game. It was always a game. She would play it, not because she wanted to, but because it was the only option left. 

He chuckled and conceded, “Alright, then. But we’ll do it my way. Please excuse me for a moment.”

And he left, the slim cut of his fine, dark jeans and the gleam on his dark blue vest disappearing behind the heavy slam of the chamber door. 

When she was left alone, she allowed herself to loosen her jaw and felt her teeth chatter. The prolonged stress was taking its toll and it was taking everything not to shake apart beneath the restraints and the silky voice of the fucking devil.

She visualized her mother, the jet black curtain of hair and the freckles on her tan arms and the accent which curled around her cheeks and she felt held. She calmed. Half of her was not of this place, this Western country and its militant Christian cults and its xenophobia. Half of her would always belong to her mother and her mother's homeland. No one could take that from her. It was written in her thick curls and her olive skin. It was written in her feral resistance.

She would survive John Seed. 

When the door’s lock clicked, she felt ready to go another round with him. Ready for a back and forth, ready for him to breach her space and splinter her sense of safety until he would leave again and she would rebuild again and he would return to this room where she cried and pissed and shrieked.

She remembered, vaguely, a bedtime story that went on and on in her childhood. There were genies in it, and lethal scimitars, and at the center was a woman in silks and scarves to hide her trembling lips as she spoke in a voice of cinnamon and scarlet to a king who would behead her if she stopped talking.

It was her mother who was Persian, but it was her father who would read it. The phantom of his soft, Southern drawl strummed against her ears and the lost tenderness of it in this horrible room made her want to scream.

The memory and the urge faded as a hand turned the handle on the door.

John was whistling a jaunty tune as he entered, something she’d never heard but which was predictably bluegrass. It cut through her, was too delighted for someone standing in some grand fucking mausoleum of her collected filth and agony.

Her eyes drifted over to the bit of skin stapled to the wall that read _ Lust _ and she took a deep, deliberate breath.

John walked over to his tool table and placed a Dasani water bottle and an empty coffee cup on the table. Between his fingers was clutched a green, Dollar Store toothbrush and a travel sized tube of Crest. At the sight, Rook felt a twist of emotion that she knew was the pressure of fear and anxiety, but that enfolded her like relief. A weeping sort of joy.

She noted that it was becoming difficult to differentiate the good feelings from the bad. 

“In the interest of promoting camaraderie,” John said so cheerfully she couldn’t tell if he thought he meant it or if he knew exactly how thick his voice was with sarcasm, “I’ll see to you myself.”

Her jaw clenched and he saw it, having become accustomed to her tells. His face hollowed out in response and he was a wraith of fury putting on a thin veneer of amiability. Rook felt that in this room he knew he could release the demon in him, the thing that snapped if you turned your back and hoped that you would.

“Surely you didn’t think I’d let you have the use of your arms long enough to attack me,” he chided, squeezing a thin line of toothpaste onto the toothbrush bristles. He splashed a bit of water over it and nodded his head like he’d done something momentous. 

His strong hand clamped down on her jaw and squeezed until the pressure had her opening her mouth. Shame filled her. She was a compulsive flosser by nature, always carrying some in her purse for after meals. Always before bed. She took care of herself and her hygiene and it was humiliating, the wince he made at her rancid breath.

No matter that she hadn’t chosen it. No matter that it was his fault. 

“How do you live with yourself, I wonder, with your never-ending rage and the blood of the slaughtered soaking your feet,” John said as he began to brush her molars. He was oddly gentle. He didn’t try to make her swallow the toothbrush or jab at her tonsils. It was a remarkably vulnerable position he was placing her in--propping her open in his palms and grooming her himself. 

She felt her eyes flutter close at the soft contact and the taste of peppermint. She wanted to shut herself off from him, separate the comfort she felt from the monster administering it.

“Shhh, no, no,” he said, releasing her jaw and trailing his fingers over her wild eyebrows and her oily eyelids like she was his favorite doll. Something falsely beloved, crafted from man-made materials but not quite human. 

“No, you will witness how I soothe you,” he told her in a low, rich register. A natural tenor, not that she wanted to notice, “You are so convinced I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to know you. How to love you. How to love anyone.”

It was the cruelest thing he’d done yet. Her ribs were bruised and her lip busted like a grape and her eyes fat and tender from crying and impact. She was starved and delirious and there’d been no sunlight for days or weeks, however long he’d had her. 

She’d forgotten what she looked like, but she felt she knew every fleck of Prussian blue in his gleaming eyes. Every line of his face, the graceful slope of his nose, and the ink and the art and the scars that stitched him together. 

He brushed her teeth for long moments, enough for her to pull herself together. His whole hand clasped her throat and stroked down to her collarbones when he was finished. Before he could offer somewhere for her to spit, she swallowed the foamy toothpaste, a tingling minty path down into her stomach that offered her some small measure of peace. 

_ You are so convinced I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to know you_, he’d said.

“You don’t,” she finally answered him, “I don’t think you know what love is. I don’t think you’ve ever known.”

His back was to her as he poured half the water from the water bottle into the coffee cup and pulled a clean face towel out of his back pocket.

His shoulders pulled up to his ears like she’d pelted him with a rock after her comment. 

“I’ve seen the bodies you’ve left behind,” he told her calmly, though his body was so locked up she thought he might fall over or punch the wall in front of him, “You shoot as many times as you can. A trail of bodies littered with bullet holes. Folded over themselves like marionettes with snapped strings.”

Rook winced. It was hard enough to deal with it in the moment. Remembering it wasn’t easy. Rehashing it with someone who clearly despised her and was trying to snap her in half like a Kit Kat felt even worse.

He turned to her with an expression that spoke of fixation and malice. He thought she was evil. Impure. Unclean. He thought she was killing a holy people--_his_ holy people. 

He dragged a stool over to sit in front of her, his back straight and his neck the sort of thick that seemed so boyish and so sweet she couldn’t drag her eyes away from it. In high school, a boy like him would have knocked her flat. Made her shy. Instead, he was trying to beat his Christian concept of sin out of her and make her feel like shit about surviving.

“All you’ve done is made them animals,” she told him honestly, “They start shooting before they realize it’s me sometimes, did you know that? Before they realize it’s not one of their own. There’s no reasoning with them--there’s no _talking_.”

“Is that what you tell yourself? It certainly doesn’t help you sleep at night,” John replied, dipping a folded corner of towel into the cup to dampen it. When he raised it out of the cup, a few drops of water dribbled down his wrist to soak into the expensive fabric of the shirt that was rolled up to his elbow.

“Better than you,” Rook countered, a bit mesmerized by seeing something that didn’t involve pain or the anticipation of it, “You don’t tell yourself anything at all, John. You’re smart. I can see the wheels turn in your mind when you taunt me--try to _break_ me. You know what you’ve done to them.”

He stared her straight in the eyes and she wondered if anyone else in her entire life had made this much eye contact with her. If anyone else knew the depth of her irises and exact length of her lashes and every fleck of chestnut and umber in her eyes like he did. Somewhere she couldn’t feel right now, that thought hurt.

He raised the wet corner of the towel towards her and just when she thought he would wipe her face, he pressed it to her closed mouth. She felt the press of clean water against her lips and she swore every molecule in her body cried out for it.

“Suck,” he commanded her quietly.

And she did. She opened her mouth and let John the Baptist nudge the cloth onto her tongue and she closed her lips around it and she sucked, pulling the water into her mouth and sighing deeply around it. It reminded her off the ice chips nurses gave patients after surgery. A smidge of relief after an era of suffering.

John pressed a thumb to the corner of her eye in warning and she opened hers again to meet his. He always wanted her to know he was watching her, that he was there.

She took another long pull and it wasn’t heated, though she held his eyes and he held hers. There was no sex here, no steam to indicate desire in the air. She wouldn’t have known what to do with that anyway.

It was survival. It was knowing he would give her water and knowing that he was cruel and feeling every bit aware of his impulsive generosity. There _was_ an intimacy. It was searing as a brand and she thought she could see it twining around them, her hold on humanity tenuous and looking more and more like his short eyelashes and the groomed whiskers of his beard.

He watched her like he might never look away, and then he did. He pulled the towel away and dipped it again and this time he stroked it down her cheek. The water was room temperature and felt like paradise on her skin.

Long draws of the towel over her face, long moments of silence between them, and this felt closer to a baptism than the near-drowning in the river. But it was entirely nonreligious. It just felt human. It just felt like there was a single drop of goodness in him and she’d found it, the only bit of him that wasn’t drenched in madness, and he was letting her have it. 

After this, she imagined, there would be nothing left. It was like a currency and he was almost out of it after a lifetime of misery and then a career of brutality.

He wiped her face clean and then her neck and then her arms. The towel and the water were long stained black from grime, but he kept going. Her whole upper half was cool and his eyes glinted like moonshine in deep barrels. 

“I want,” he started, a drag in his voice as he rubbed the soft bend of an elbow, “your name. We had a deal.”

She felt sluggish, hazy and overwhelmed by a touch that didn’t bruise, careful to keep the shaking confined to her chest as she spoke, “So we did. I will tell you one of them.”

He set the towel and the cup down on the ground by his stool and gave her every ounce of his attention. He waited patiently for a minute before his temper began to show.

“Well?” he snapped.

She merely raised her chin, a show of self and of pride, something she knew he’d despise. His gaze sharpened, his fists clenched, but he acquiesced and leaned in closer. She was tied to the chair, but she was able to lean in those last few inches.

She could smell his cologne, the only pleasant scent in the room and it blocked out everything else. Made it easier to reward him and taunt him in kind.

Lips close to his ear, his body heat wafting off him nearly as warm as sunlight, she whispered, “Scheherazade."

In her head she heard her father reading _One Thousand and One Nights_, having tucked her blanket underneath her feet and switched on the bedroom lamp. In her life now, there was a man infinitely more dangerous. So much closer to a mad king than a herald, his blue eyes frost and ice and death though he ran hot and kept close to her.

She thought he might kill her and welcomed the thought--dying now that she felt clean for the first time in the endless dark he had trapped her in.

But he only pulled back, pressed his thumb into her split lip, and laughed in a way she hadn't heard from him before. Like he was shocked or charmed or less inclined to curb her boldness.

"Does that make me Shahryār?" he asked, his face lit up in thought as he remembered literature from a time before The Book of Joseph. A time before the only book preserved was The Word. When there was thousands of years of books for John to lose himself in. The famous Middle Eastern folk tales had been new and exciting and _mercenary_. 

Rook sobered. There was obviously a shared love of reading between them. She knew he was well read, but hadn't been sure he'd pick up on her reference. But then he did and he was human, luminous as he understood her instead of sermonizing her into unconsciousness, but it was terrible because she was still in this room where everything was humid and jagged metal. Where her arms were bound to the arms of a piece of shit office chair and she'd never felt so weak.

She was exhausted. Wanting to rewind their time together so she could unsee it. His lapse into personhood. Her taunting which had turned into teasing. But she had no one else and she had to survive him even if it meant reaching for him in whatever ways sustained her.

_Bitter_, she thought. It tasted bitter to need him to endure even as he tried to strip away all the things that made her herself.

He watched as something extinguished within her. He must have; his eyes grew wider like he was trying to take more of her in. She was reminded of a cat batting yarn, needing it to unravel.

Rook said, "That depends. Will you kill me if I stop telling you stories?"

John wasn't looking at her for once. He laid one of her hands on top of his, palm up, traced the lines of it with fingers that felt like petals.

When he did lift his head, he looked like he was in the throes of a psalm. He looked like she'd given him a gift that he had unwrapped in her hand. Like he'd never seen anything better or more interesting or more awful.

"Yes," he told her, prayerful, as he turned to reach for his tattoo gun. 


	2. the plumed mask, the mask with a sutured mouth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rook meets a cultist who condemns her for some unsurprising reasons, has a splish-splashing time, and learns a little more about John's hair-trigger temper.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's no way a cult full of rural, anti-government, gun-loving bros is completely absent of racism and that's just what it is.

“I’m going to make a tapestry of our progress,” John had told her, a flush of excitement on his cheeks before he’d knocked her out.

Her last conscious memory was of the buzz of the tattoo gun.

When she woke up, she was alone and her left arm had a bandage high on her forearm, taped securely to her skin. Bound, she couldn’t do anything more than stare at it and hope really, really hard that he hadn’t put anything on her that she would end up cutting off herself in a panicked rage later on.

It didn’t feel like a word--the throb of it took up space and she knew it was an image. He’d marked her, marred her with ink and whim and she would take pleasure, if the time ever came, in taking one of his tattoos from him. 

It was only fair. If he would try to make her care, force onto her his values and ideas of what a woman and a servant of his brother was supposed to be, then she would show him how easily a man could be diminished by one of his victims.

He had it coming.

With him gone, her head felt like it was clearing. Her arms and face and neck, washed clean, but everything below the waist made her soul want to leave her body. How could he do this to her? How could he do this to anyone?

But he had told her before she succumbed to the dark, that he rarely took more than a week to break someone. He’d told her she’d been with him eleven days. Not the literal weeks she’d believed, but a shadow had coiled up in her stomach like a snake knowing how easily she bent. How quickly she fell. Longer than the others, but it meant nothing if she gave into him.

Which felt like an inevitability. 

She wasn’t equipped for the isolation, not in the same way she knew she could take the pain.

A Peggy entered the room holding a two buckets. One was empty and the other held water.

“This is wasted on you, sinner,” he growled at her, spitting the vitriol of the righteous, “But I guess you have stop reeking so the Baptist can claim your soul for the Father.”

He moved over to her, noting her silence and the bandage on her arm. He smirked, coming closer to her and dropping the buckets on the floor with two ear-shattering clanks of metal against concrete.

He threw a towel in her face and warned her, “I’m untying you, but I will pump you full of bullets if you make a move against me. Clean up. You’re disgusting.”

Rook was already making plans to incapacitate him, her adrenaline spiking like a jolt of lightning cleaving through an oak, when he pulled out a syringe and his smirk turned even nastier. He was enjoying this.

Rook was beginning to separate the cultists into different groups--there were the paranoid, scared ones who shot first and thought later; there were the recovering addicts who were using Eden’s Gate as some fucked up rehabilitation center; and there were the ones like this Peggy, the ones John seemed to like the most, who took enjoyment from wielding whatever power they were given.

She didn't want to speak a word to a man like him, but that syringe drove all the thought out of her mind. She thought at some point she’d stop trying to futilely shimmy out of her restraints, but her chest and torso shook like it was the first time she woke up here and she was freshly caught and spooked as hell.

“So she does have some life in her yet,” the Peggy spoke to himself, obviously savoring her fear. She would gut him like a fucking fish so well she’d make Skylar as proud as when she managed to catch the Admiral.

The nearer he got to her, the more alive his eyes became. He reminded her of one of those sick fucks who were drawn to law enforcement careers because they wanted to beat someone down. She hated working with those types, hated how they had the badge same as her even as they ridiculed her gender and her skin. Hope County had seemed different as far as coworkers; it was a shame things had turned out this way.

When he stood in front of her, she found him staring at her face in evaluation. Like she was a rat in a cage. 

“You’re one of them foreign girls,” he drawled, “Thought you had to be a U.S. citizen to be police. Looks like standards have really gone downhill if they’re putting your terrorist ass in a uniform.”

And there it was, what she suspected was within the cult all along. Rook knew some people were here for salvation, but there wasn’t a chance in hell some people hadn’t joined hoping for some ethnic fucking cleansing. The amount of black people and other minorities she’d seen here was fucking embarrassing and all of a sudden she saw a huge, gaping crack in Eden Gate’s foundation. 

She gave a cold, tense smile, “Why, yes, I am one of those foreign girls. Careful, don’t get too close or I might infect you with _ Islam_.”

Rook saw the minute he stopped seeing her as a person and it was when she talked back. Where John seemed unable to differentiate between the subjugated and only true noticed her when she was resisting him, this man was resentful of her mind and her mouth.

He jabbed the needle into her chest and shot her up with Bliss.

“Just to make sure you don’t go all jihad on me,” he laughed. She’d never wanted to gouge someone’s eyes out more. 

_Be peaceful,_ her mother would have said, reminding her of her favorite aphorism, _ The world means you no ill. You mean it no ill. _

But she’d never really believed that, had she?

Her eyes burned as she stared at him. He looked momentarily apprehensive before it melded into the smug countenance of every hick white man she’d ever known who thought she was scum on the bottom of his all-American boot.

The Bliss ate at her anger like acid, ate it away until all she had was a wolfish happiness that he was untying her, though his hands touched her arms and ankles for far too long. 

“Undress and bathe yourself, savage,” he told her, but she could barely hear the derision. It didn’t touch her. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply and when she opened them she was in the house full of windows she’d grown up in. She was saturated in light and she could hear all the TVs in the house blaring _The Young and the Restless_, just like her mother liked it when she was off work and cooking up a storm.

She peeled the soiled clothes from her body and knelt at the bucket, though to her it was a steaming basin. Rising from it was steam that smelled of lavender, the bath salts her father always used when soaking his sore feet after coming home from a job.

A voice broke through her elated daydreaming, “Damn, I’d fuck ya, but our races should never mix. No kids from that union,” and then an ugly chuckle.

Rook shook her head like she was shaking off mosquitoes buzzing around her head. Whatever that was was a distant memory. Whoever that was had no place where everything was golden and sacred. 

She dipped the towel in the water and frowned, wondering at how she saw the coils of steam rising but the temperature was all wrong. Tepid. Interrupting her vision of home and unwelcome for it. She cleaned her legs, between her toes, between her legs.

She might have wept, but she was too untouchable to notice if she really was or not.

When it was over, nothing more to wipe away, clothes were shoved in her face. She slid on cotton panties and a sports bra. There was a pair of scuffed jeans and a loose, solid grey t-shirt. It was more than she was expecting. It felt like silk, like she was dressing up for a night at the opera. 

The figure with the wretched voice tied her up again, might have ripped out a chunk of her hair as she squealed in pain. Nothing of her bravado left in the Bliss, raw panic setting in as her childhood home disintegrated in front of her, her mother’s shuffling around the kitchen fading like a door had slammed in her face. 

She drifted in the space between her mind’s fantasy and her body’s reality until John Seed made his way back to her.

“Did you like your bath?” he asked her when he opened the door and slipped in, groomed as always, “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there. There were some land disputes that couldn’t wait. I sent my best, though, I’m sure you were well taken care of.”

She thought he sounded somewhat disgruntled. It had been the first time she’d seen someone besides him while conscious in all the days she’d been in his bunker. 

She scoffed weakly, the threat of the Peggy’s truly occurring to her and filling her with anger, “You mean the bigot with the racist boner for Middle Eastern girls? Yeah, five stars, great time, John.”

Rook clenched her teeth together. The traces of Bliss in her system were fading, but she was saying too much. She never admitted it when someone made some backwards comment to her. She didn’t want to give it more power than it really had.

He crouched in front of her, pressed his whole palm over her exposed throat as he always did when he was speaking to her softly. The next breath she took was calmer and she hated it. Hated how he could do that. How he’d taught her that gesture meant _safe_.

“The what now?” he asked evenly. He dipped his head down to catch her eyes and she could feel how his middle finger settled in the notch of her neck like a key fitting into a lock. 

She went to speak again and realized she was starting to really come down. Her stomach lurched with nausea and all the searing sentences she had yet to release scrambled on her tongue. She couldn’t say anything. Her best asset aside from her hand-eye coordination--gone. Gone.

The injection was blunting her ability to talk to him. She shook her head, hating the consequences of a drug she hadn’t asked for. Hating how her only way of asserting herself was squashed beneath the heavy heel of Bliss. 

“_Hahh_,” she panted in frustration. She was becoming agitated. This wasn’t supposed to go like this. She was supposed to rip into him for what he’d sent to her prison. 

He looked angry, but not at her for once.

“The Bliss is keeping you from articulating and you hate it,” he surmised, the furrows on his forehead prominent with a mirrored frustration, “It had to happen, though, deputy. No one else can handle you. You’d have just escaped and I cannot have that.”

She glared at him and when she couldn’t hold it she gasped with despair. She wanted to tell him. He was the only person there was to talk to and it was breaking her not to give him an earful of everything he had forced upon her. 

That sick fuck in here before, watching her naked as she experienced drug-enhanced hallucinations of her fucking childhood home. She gasped again. He’d watched her act like a brainless, scared child splashing water over herself on the dirty floor.

She gasped again. Her lungs still felt empty.

“Breathe, Scheherazade,” he murmured to her, light pressure on her chest like he was manually trying to slow her air intake.

“No,” she cried, sounding like a fucking idiot, “No. _ No_!”

He was watching her carefully, categorizing her reactions. She hated the Bliss, hated it more than the layers of bruises he’d left on her and more than their arguments about who the real monster was. And she hated it when he touched her, but she hated it more when he didn’t and when the fuck did that happen?

For the first time, he appeared genuinely contrite, saying sincerely, “I didn’t expect this from you. I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”

At this, she felt dizzy, kept taking heaving lungfuls of air as if she’d broken the surface of a frozen lake. He _didn’t mean_ to hurt her? Who was he kidding?

“All,” she panted as her voice cracked and went far too high, “You’re,” and another guttural sounding breath, “Good at.”

His expression hardened. He took his hand off her as she panicked and sputtered, always under his magnifying glass. Splintering in high definition beneath his gaze as he decided when to extend his kindness. And when to retract it.

That was when her vision went black.

\--

“Deputy,” he called in dulcet tones, “Wake up. We have work to attend to.”

There was no telling how long she’d been out. She’d been drugged, but she’d bathed. Her prison seemed brighter with clean teeth and a simple bath. She didn’t want to consider the bargains she’d make if she could have a repeat.

He was combing his fingers through her hair and she grimaced knowing how tangled and oily it must be. Clean. Just when she thought she was clean, he recalled another piece of her made foul with neglect.

She grimaced, but just before she opened her mouth to speak she heard a whimper.

Her eyes flicked open to see John in front of her, a gentle smile on his face. She was beginning to believe Sharky’s words when he’d told her John might have feelings for her. But that was when they’d never actually spoken; that was when all he had to go on was the driving force of her will that crashed against his beliefs and his orders like the slap of the sea against rocks.

Now--now there was much, much more than that.

“John, what’s going on?” she asked as she looked behind him and saw the Peggy who’d taunted her with his ugly remarks as she bathed. 

He was crying, probably because he obviously had a broken nose and a useless arm if the limp bloody appendage didn’t give it away. He was scared and she couldn’t help but think how everyone looked like a child when they were afraid. They looked a moment away from climbing into bed with their parents. No matter who they were.

The Peggy was undoubtedly a terrible person and when he was threatening her and jabbing her with fucking Bliss, she’d been ready to eviscerate him. But when he was defenseless and kneeling in front of her like a sacrament, she wanted him gone. Unhurt. Spirited away.

“You were so out of it before your little hibernation,” he mused like she hadn’t spoken at all, probably because he knew just how much she loathed it, “You’ve been asleep for twenty-three hours. Exhaustion, I suppose, but then all your sins bubbled up and incapacitated you.”

“Your fake sister’s addictive substances knocked me out,” she grit out, “Sin has nothing to do with it, unless you count your inability to take ownership for the inhumane operation you’re running here, _ Baptist_.”

“My sweet Scheherazade,” he said mildly, pinching her chin between his thumb and index finger, “that’s no way to speak...now that you can again.”

All the concern he’d seemed to show when she was losing her shit before she’d fucking passed out was absent. He was in control again and moving his chess pieces around as she floundered and blustered her way through their conversation

And he wouldn’t stop calling her that name, though it wasn't really hers, wouldn’t let her forget the one single time she’d bent instead of stubbornly broken and crowned herself heroine in the struggle between them. As if to remind her of what she would do again. And she would, she knew, she’d continue making offers until that well ran dry because she feared she was going mad from the dark and the loneliness. 

“Tell me what this is about,” she requested, calm as she could manage, because he seemed more pliant--as pliant as a man like him got--when she spoke to him like a peer.

“This is about due diligence,” he answered her, “I followed up. I didn’t want to believe one of my own was harboring such filthy thoughts after their baptism. After they were welcomed into our house clean from sin, offered warmth at our hearth--”

And he rounded on the Peggy kneeling behind him, took him by the shoulders, and slammed him into the concrete floor. There was a crack as the man's skull hit ground followed by a warbled groan and a broken sob.

John was unhinged, furious all of a sudden.

“Tell me,” he demanded of the Chosen he'd entrusted with her, “Did you tell her you wanted to defile her? That she was less than human because of her skin color? Tell me,” and he picked the man up and forced him to the ground again.

“Yes,” groaned the Chosen, “Yes.”

John screamed in his face, more out of control than Rook had ever seen him, “I offered you a seat at my table. I called you Chosen. You met The Father. I saw him touch _ your hand _ and you have gone against all our teachings. You will not _ judge _ by race. You will not entertain _ politics_. This was your creed. To me! And you have squandered it!”

Rook’s heart rate skyrocketed. It was one thing to be on the receiving end of John’s temper, but entirely another thing to watch him go apeshit on someone else. She wanted to intervene. She wanted him to stop. She didn’t grow up in a family of yelling. She didn’t like hearing it. And whatever that vile Peggy had to say to her, it was _ her _ concern and not his.

“John,” she whispered, “John, please stop. John, please. What can I give? What can I give to make this stop?”

Her trump card and the only ace in her sleeve. She didn’t know why, couldn’t fathom what about her had possibly garnered his attention, but he seemed to think simple knowledge of her was a treat in itself. Or maybe he was like that with all of his Confessions while they were happening. 

“Nothing,” he swore to her, “Nothing can remedy this betrayal. Though…”

He stopped terrorizing the Peggy long enough to look back up at her. And what a sight she must have been--her eyebrows unplucked for nearly two weeks, her skincare routine abandoned because no one seemed to think Clinique was an offering they could make a torture victim, her features dark and pronounced in all the ways she knew John was unaccustomed to seeing in women. Maybe he’d been part of the melting pot that was Atlanta in his life before the Project, but here in Hope he only saw Irish and English and German descendants. Girls of blonde and strawberry hair who grew up in Christian guilt rather than the stalwart pride of Iranian culture. 

Was it any wonder he couldn’t seem to understand her? she thought to herself.

“I know,” John said, grabbing the Peggy by the front of his shirt and dragging him off the floor and over to Rook, “I know how he will be absolved. After all, the _ punishment _ must fit the _ crime_. And how am I supposed to make you feel welcome if you don’t believe our Project is safe for you, deputy?”

It was a testament to how Rook had come to anticipate John’s moods and impulses by how quickly she put his idea together.

_No_, she thought. _Fuck no._

Her eyes welled up and flowed over and it was so fucking painful, how he was already watching her face for recognition, captivated by how quickly she seemed to understand the direction of his thoughts. He was doing so much here, indulging in the punishment that was his right to decide and indulging in his own selfish joy that she was so alive. So quick. 

So his.

“No,” she whispered, a hopeless plea.

He nodded his head in affirmation and grabbed a knife from his workbench. Pulled his Chosen over right in front of her bound legs and forced him onto his knees before her. He was a mess of bloodless skin and slaughterhouse eyes and snot, but he would not move from where John had placed him.

She wished he would. That he would pop up and run for the door. She didn't want this.

John circled around the back of her chair, encasing her as he leaned down and wrapped the arm holding the knife around her side and directly in front of the kneeling Chosen's body.

His lips brushed her tangled hair and his hot breath hitting her scalp as he exhaled.

She wanted him to sink into the earth. She wanted him to disappear into the Henbane River, stones tied to his feet. She wanted him to hold her properly because there was no one else here to do it and she was terrified of what would happen next.

John cut the ropes binding her right hand, head shifting closer to her and lips catching the tip of her ear as he spoke, “Now put your hand over mine on the knife. Nice and easy, no sudden movements--yes, yes. Just like that.”

She was crying in earnest now, tears he hadn’t witnessed since she’d first come to him. Since the thumbtacks, but there was something sweeter, knowing it was her heart crying out and not just a physical reaction to pain. 

“No, please,” she told him, unwilling to beg for herself but willing to beg on behalf of someone else.

“Can you honestly tell me you’d ever feel safe if you decided to stand beside me and he was there, too?” he asked, the warmth of him and his cologne sinking into her as his free hand curled around her ribs and reaching up to lay his hand at her throat. 

_Safe_, the hand signaled to her because that's what he'd taught her. But it wasn't safe for anyone else--another lesson and he seemed to have thousands to teach her.

Deprived of touch, deprived of affection, deprived of dignity--and this was how he chose to show all of them. He would give her power if it was connected to his. He would give her touch and warmth. He knew the secrets of her needs, the way she fought not to show him how deeply she required connection.

He knew she was desperate for his fingers splayed delicately around her throat, secure as a glove sliding over a hand, the only spot of security he'd given her in this place.

“I would never,” she told him, only half aware of what she was saying, “I would never join you. Look at what you’re doing.”

“_No _ is the answer you're looking for,” John said for her, “You would never trust me. You’re appalled, yes, I see that. But you understand what I’m doing. Grip my hand tighter. Together, we hold this blade. Look at it. See it. The only way you touch a weapon is if you’re one of mine.”

She _was_ watching. She was staring at her warm-toned skin, the color of cream in coffee, laid and entwined with his pale, big hand. Like a study in contrasts. Hers over his, but only because he willed it. And the knife glinted white-silver, the point just touching the Chosen’s throat.

“Show me how you did it before I found you,” demanded John Seed, “I want to feel it for myself. Help me punish the breaker of The Father’s laws. You are a jewel. You are a boon to me.”

When she hesitated, he hissed into her dirty curls, “Or I will make this so much worse for you to bear. One quick kill or hours of his atonement? You will choose for us.”

Rook knew then that today she’d been beaten. That as receptive as he was to their game, there were limits and there was his anger and his need for retribution--against her and on her behalf. She looked the Peggy in the eye and pushed away all thoughts of her mother, her father, the lights that guided her. 

They didn’t deserve to be tarnished. This was a burden she would have to carry alone until she had time by herself where she could think free of his presence.

She didn’t say a word, just tightened her grip on his around the knife and after a deep breath and shaky inhale she plunged the knife through the Chosen’s neck. She would have gone straight for his artery, but John’s hand wouldn’t budge except to go forward.

He exhaled into her hair as the Chosen gurgled and blood poured and poured and soaked his linen shirt. As with most of her experience with killing, it had been too easy to do it. Rook felt John’s free hand stroke down her the tendons in her neck, press softly against her sternum, and finally cup her empty belly. She knew her face was wet, could feel tears pooling in her collarbones.

She thought John might have pressed his nose against her temple as he felt her heart thud through her body like a frightened rabbit.

“You did well,” John spoke softly, something content in his voice as the Chosen felt to the floor and seemed to finally be dying, “Look at the righteous thing we have done together.”

Rook’s teeth chattered. She knew she had to look and the sight branded itself into her mind. A racist prick, sure, but she’d never wanted to truly kill someone for hating her. Not unless they were running towards her, guns blazing. He had been injured already, fearful and helpless.

And they’d murdered him.

“I don’t think today is the day you die, Scheherazade,” John teased as he came to be in front of her, tossing the knife away like it was a toy and taking full possession of her free arm.

Crying and shaking, she asked, half out of her mind, “Is there any way you would reconsider?”

The smile he gave her was tender, humoring, as he leaned down and set his forehead against the fragile, green-veined skin of her inner wrist. 


	3. a moonface, with a healed gash that means harvest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Peggies aren't unaware of how obsessed the Seeds are with the deputy and they obviously have some opinions about it, John tries a different method, and Rook tells a tale.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So--a note on the text referenced here. St. Augustine's Confessions were a hugely influential religious text written in the mid-300s A.D. Augustine wrote a real hybrid--part memoir, part religious contemplation/journey towards God, part theology, part philosophy--where he reflects on his life and on Catholicism and talks about how he was a huge fuck-up before he found God. Tbh it's so lucidly and superbly written. As a writer, Joseph Seed should feel fucking ashamedddddd in the face of Augustine.

To her mortification, when he left the room, she’d begun to picture his face in his gaping absence. His sure movements were so comfortable in a dingy, badly lit room that she wondered what he looked like walking down a city street. How if he could own any space, no matter how much blood lapped at his feet with the stink of urine saturating the air, what he would be like sipping coffee in an armchair at a Starbucks.

Doing something normal, regular. Something that wasn’t this.

She’d begun to think: what a loss. What a loss he was to the world around him because it was obvious he was whip-smart, obvious that he went after causes with a mouth-frothing tenacity that got things done, such a rare quality--and this is what he chose to do with his life.

He’d been gone for a day at least, after they’d killed his Chosen. He’d pressed his forehead against her wrist like he was stamping his initials into it. A tattoo without ink to match the bandage of her left arm and whatever image was beneath it.

And he’d stroked her hair, gaze flickering over her face, a finger tracing the wing of her brow and she knew he saw something in her he wanted to will into existence. And he’d left.

A nameless female Peggy had brought her her last meal--the cult ate simply and typical of Northerners, with a poor sense for seasoning--and she’d gotten upset when Rook couldn’t choke down the meat.

“You are lucky even to get this,” she berated Rook, whose stomach twisted at the smell of hot, red beef. 

Even so, she had company. Another person, another body reminding her that she was still part of the world.

Even an enemy was welcome when it was another woman. Rook missed women, missed Hudson so fiercely for only knowing her a couple months, missed her friends from her hometown and the arcade bar they always wore their grungy boots and winged eyeliner to, missed her mother smelling of bergamot and berries and bugging her about how to work Facebook.

The Peggy was dark-haired and hazel-eyed, form a mystery beneath the cult uniform of cargo pants and a hardy, shapeless shirt dyed with the Project’s emblem. It was an unsightly thing, made Rook think of the Crusades and the culture of violence that felled men and women and children who said no to its crimson tide.

But a woman. Someone who knew what it was to have period cramps and the perils of underwire. It was a physiological response, even to one who hated her, for her to relax just a bit.

“I can’t,” Rook explained, “Thank you for the food. I appreciate it, but I don’t want that part.”

The Peggy tutted.

“What they see in you, I would say I don’t know but that would be a lie,” the woman told her, crossing her arms over her chest like she was addressing a naughty child, “A viper and a temptress is what you are. Brother John is still a man, no matter what, and you’re an apple to the men of this cause.”

It was the first time she’d heard criticism of the Baptist within his own community and it was vehement and unsurprised; the Peggy didn’t sound afraid of retribution. She sounded like she was rolling her eyes over the antics of a well known, rabble-rousing neighborhood boy.

Rook merely stared at her, determined to siphon whatever comfort she could from the closest thing she was going to get to female company.

She smiled, pretending she was debating a friend, “Surely you don’t think women drive men crazy. _ Men _drive men crazy. Women are just trying to get through the day. I haven’t been roughing it in the woods as some new beauty regimen, ma’am.”

The Peggy blinked at her, something shifting in her eyes, like she’d watched Rook transfigure from a diseased possum into a person. 

“Name’s Penny,” the woman said, “Always hated that ‘ma’am’ shit so cut it out.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Rook said, cheekily and yearning for every woman she’d ever gotten to love, “I thought you couldn’t curse.”

“John’s people follow his example,” Penny countered with raised brows, daring her to argue that John Seed wasn’t dropping f-bombs constantly. She’d noticed that John’s bunker held all the newest recruits who seemed to use it as a bunker where there was constantly conversation, constantly a sense of bustle and excitement. She was loathe to admit that once someone converted and if they upheld their promises to their new way of life, John was unlikely to curb their thoughts or movements.

He seemed to expect them to _ live_. Not like Jacob’s animals--and Rook wasn’t talking about the wolves. Not like Faith’s puppets or Joseph’s devotees so rapturous they were hardly human.

“I thought you were all Joseph’s people,” she said, inquiringly. There was no other stimulus here; there’d been no books and no music. There was no bird watching and deer spotting to distract her from the numbing stagnancy of sitting still in a dark room. All she had to do was remember her life and think on this new community surrounding her.

Penny gave her a humorless smile, “Things are rarely so simple.”

She knew it was terrible to have this moment of give with the woman, this moment of peace at having a conversation--but Penny wasn’t bulky and heaving and the masculine sort of imposing that was always trying to fucking crush her. And she was talking back. Miracle upon miracle.

“Nothing about John has been simple,” Rook said bitterly, “And nothing about the last month has been easy.”

Penny bit her lip, considering, reserved but not vilifying her anymore.

She said, “He told us about Damien and how he was put down. Said you helped him. We have a zero tolerance for that kind of thing. All of us who have converted are equals in this community.”

Rook had been used to people making generalized statements about race when they weren’t concretely inclusive all her damn life and merely hummed.

But she would say that as awful as John’s methods and as many people as she herself had killed in the previous weeks, she trusted that sliver of him that wanted her to feel safe even if he was coercing her to do it with him.

“He really is trying to free you, you know,” Penny said, “Like he freed all of us. You’ve been in this room longer than anyone I’ve ever known to be here.”

Rook licked her chapped lips, listening. Penny had a voice like a singer, high and clear. For someone who operated with such a need for stimuli, it was a precious thing to hear.

"John Seed seems to think having fears marks us as _ guilty_,” Rook said softly, “Like being afraid of pain means we deserve it. But children fear pain and animals fear pain. I think he was taught that fear is a sin and he’s wrong. Fear is just your body talking to you. You’re supposed to listen to it. It means your body wants you to survive. It has nothing to do with...freedom.”

Penny wouldn’t talk after that and while she wasn’t what Rook would call friendly, she wasn’t crude or mean once they’d had a conversation. No more of that temptress bullshit, either, which worked Rook’s last nerve.

Rook picked at the meat, pulled it apart. It wasn’t anything she’d been interested in for years. She’d even felt guilty about the venison she’d had to force down her throat when she wasn’t near any of the rivers and absolutely had to get some protein in her. The best time she’d had in Montana since the Reaping was fishing with Skylar, when she’d gotten the protein her body craved and nothing screamed as she gutted it. 

And then afterwards--when the only red meat she was culling were Peggies and there was somehow always fire everywhere and the scent of burning flesh made her gag. 

The last thing Penny told her was when she crouched to pick up the poorly constructed lunch tray. It made Rook feel like she was in middle school again.

“A gift doesn’t always feel like a gift,” Penny said, “And your fear stinks like a heavy pelt you’ve wrapped around yourself. Let him take it off you.”

Rook watched as she left, not in particularly quiet or stealthy way. She figured the woman wasn’t a fighter. Not that Rook had been until a month ago until some crazy fuck threw himself into the wings of their helicopter and dropped them into hell like a crane delivering a baby to someone’s doorstep.

She thought about what she’d read in the Book of Joseph. It was just another nonfiction book that wasn't particularly well-written and was convinced it was communicating profundity better than it actually did. Someone’s sad story and their triumphant rise. Memoirs were like that--people hoping they could be phoenixes and trying to will it into existence. 

_ But why_, she thought to herself in the dirty silence of her prison, _ why do they get to rise to the top and no one else? Why do they think their stories mean more, just because they scream the loudest? _

\---

John entered with little fanfare, just the unwinding of the wheel-lock and a heaving push and he was again in her space. It had become hers, through her blood and all the other fluids that streamed from her as she became malleable and cowed.

He quirked a smile at her and it was strangely sweet before it grew and became the cocky, smug thing she wanted to rip off his fucking face.

“I like it better, you in here,” John told her and if the words seemed shy or abashed he just _ wasn’t _, “Where I can dig into you, like a gardener sifting for tubers. You can’t fall into your rage. You can only talk with me, share with me. No need for that hostile hand killing and killing and taking you further away from my grasp.”

She heard him speak and her stomach tightened. His was the warmest voice she’d heard since Skylar’s when they were out on the water, shooting the shit, talking about terrible first dates--and she couldn’t help but react.

But she could be angry.

“The killing didn’t stop because I’m in here. You saw to that,” she snarled at him, a flash of the Chosen Damien's bloody corpse flashing through her head.

Abruptly, John turned serious. His eyes searched hers and they were so round that they gave him a stunned and consuming expression. Like he was seeing the ocean for the first time. Seeing someone drown in it, too.

“He was never going to make it here,” he said, hands slashing through the air as he spoke, “Damien was always going to expose the sin he hid from me because nothing can conceal itself for long in the light. He ensured his own death.”

Rook stared at his tattoos, still wondering about hers, and saw the peacock feather and the goat and a knife that wiggled down his arm. She didn't want to pursue the topic of their joint murder of John's Chosen. It was fresh and it caused a mess of feelings in her that she didn't have the capacity to process with John staring at her.

She said, “Your brother thinks he wants to save me. But how long until you lose control? I’m going to end up like those poor people hanging on your walls like trophies.”

John crept over to her and dragged his stool over. It was becoming regular for them to converse this way. She was growing used to it.

“Some people are beyond saving,” he said, “Because they were nothing to begin with. There was nothing in them to mold; they were beyond helping. But not you, Scheherazade, there is so much _life_ in you. We made you in our image of righteous anger when you were set you loose from that chopper. Before it, you were like any other lamb. And now that you have been retrieved--I can fashion you again.”

“I hadn’t ever killed anyone,” she agreed, “But then I hadn’t ever had mindless acolytes wielding automatic rifles trying to murder me around a campfire. You are so sure of yourself, John, that you are not quite believable.”

He hadn’t come near her yet, hadn’t made contact with her skin in any way. It was unusual. Surely he hadn’t come to talk.

But it seemed he had because instead of responding to her jab, he shook his head and turned the full brunt of his blue eyes on her.

“When I was boy,” he said in a lilting voice, “my parents tried to have me exorcised. They thought a demon was inside of me. They woke me up in the middle of the night and they took me on a long drive. They told me we were going to a special park for me to play…”

“That didn’t happen,” sighed Rook, who was too far in this not to realize that John’s Confessions were for him as well. That he was trying to find solace in her pain...for his pain. That he wanted them to bleed into each other. He looked so singular and so sad--it was like he was baring himself to her. 

But it wasn’t fair at all. No reciprocity in hearing him speak in his lovely, clear voice when it was her who paid with her body.

“No, it was an endless two days. What they made me feel until the priest pronounced me pure again was a bottomless rage,” he admitted, “I didn’t think they’d banished a demon. It felt like they’d _ made _one. My parents didn’t believe the priest either. But I survived. I leaned into it. I learned to accept that in order to live, I had to prove how good I was at allowing myself to be tested.”

Rook didn’t know how to deal with the pity and kinship that was sweet and syrupy as molasses pooling in her stomach. She felt horrible for the child he was. Horrible that any child would exist under the care of people who tortured him.

But the caliber of wrong it was for him to do this to her would not be swept away. She knew her worth. Even in this place, so far away from the protection of all she held dear.

“Yes,” she said his favorite word, “but now you test others. There’s no good in that. The child you were suffered for _ nothing _if this is what you became.”

He didn’t strike her, not as she expected.

He thought for a moment, told her, “There’s something...magnetic, about watching you think. I never thought I’d miss law school or all the pretentious pricks in Atlanta. I don’t, really. But I miss feeling like I was talking to someone as smart as me. Lovelier, too.”

_ Sharky_, she thought, _ Sharky and Adelaide might have been onto something. _

Rook cracked a mirthless smile, “And yet all this talking and I’m still in this room.”

John gave her a look.

“If you would Confess to me, I would let you see the sun again. You could fish.”

Rook’s head snapped back as much as she could when she was tied to a piece of furniture. 

“Yes,” he grinned maliciously at her, “I know all about your favorite hobby. The only meat you’ll eat, right? I’ve spoken with Penny.”

“What’s the point of talking about this?” she asked, feeling exposed, “That has nothing to do with your games.”

And then he did something that she didn’t want to see, something she dreaded him doing: he faced her completely, fiddling with nothing, animated hands lying in his lap for the first time since they’d had the displeasure of meeting, and the smile wiped off his face.

He was quiet in saying, “But it does. I want to know you. I want to know your sins. The books you’ve read. The life you’ve lived. You know all about mine. You’ve liked bargaining for privileges, haven’t you? What about this--tell me one story, tell me about why you don’t eat meat, tell me _something_. And I’ll take you outside for an hour.”

Silence was thick between them. There was something in it. He was waiting her out and she was letting that statement linger on the air. He’d been right; she had been a lamb before the Seeds destroyed her life. Her ferocity was born of confidence, sure, but also a desperation she never wanted to feel again.

She wanted to see the sun so badly the desire throbbed like her busted lip. How seductive, her jailer--tempting her with the promise of the smell of forest and the wind in her hair.

Rook quoted, “‘And I kept seeking for an answer to the question: Where does evil come from? And I sought it in an evil way, and I did not see the evil in my own search.’”

John Seed shivered, so subtle she wouldn’t have seen it if she hadn’t become accustomed to only seeing him, and it was like a layer of unimportant junk--arrogance and righteousness and mocking--had been peeled off his face. What was left was a man who seemed breathless and deeply present.

It was heady and it made her chest ache.

She knew he'd recognize the text. She couldn't imagine one of the most important memoirs and philosophical cornerstones of the Christian religion as something John wouldn't have a functional and working knowledge of. She could tell he was a reader and there wasn't a way in hell he wasn't at least passingly familiar with it, though his memory seemed to border on photographic sometimes.

“You're quoting St. Augustine to me,” he said, eyes flickering like a jaguar's and expression incredulous and hungry, fingers twitching like he was trying to decide what to do with them, “In this nothing town in Montana.”

She breathed deep, “That’s what you remind me of. _Confessions _is dripping with you. You think everything that happens is part of your personal journey towards...feeling whole.”

John seemed ready to participate instead of just watching her.

“Don't you?” he asked, “What makes someone become a junior deputy in microscopic town in Montana in their mid-twenties? You aren’t from here originally.”

She didn't want to start there, though, didn't want to talk to him about what brought her to this green and beautiful state.

“You want a story and I want to see the sky,” she told him so she could change gears in the conversation, “So I’ll tell you one about something I actually want to talk about in this godforsaken hellhole.”

She was tired of only talking about things that scared her. Things that made her upset. Her chest fluttered from a lack of nutrients and her head was fuzzy. John looked strangely ethereal and somehow that made him easier to talk to.

“My mom didn’t let me date in high school,” she started, thinking back fondly to her mother being an overprotective ogre, “My dad thought it was ridiculous to forbid me from part of the American teenage experience and all, but she kept saying, ‘what is a child doing in a relationship? Are they getting a bank account and paying bills together?’”

John leaned back, looking more satisfied than she’d ever seen him. She wasn’t telling him dark tales of her past; she was just talking about home.

“She sounds fiery,” John commented, “What's her name?”

“Bahar. Her name was Bahar,” and she paused for a loaded moment, “And mine is June. Juniper.”

“Where in the Middle East was she from?” John asked and besides a slight widening of his eyes there was no reaction to her real name. He was just full of questions now that they had struck a deal.

She felt her mother’s fingers stroke across her forehead, a light touch that meant affection, and Bahar whispered, _Live, Juniper. Do whatever you have to do to live._

In the gutter he’d put her in, the cage where he’d cornered her and punished her for the many lives she’d extinguished trying to save the citizens of Hope County--in a chair where she’d circled through every emotion a person could feel and come out of it with his eyes on her, glinting. Waiting. Expectant.

“Iran,” she whispered through chapped lips, “She was born in Tehran and emigrated in her twenties. My dad was American.”

He asked, “And when your mother said no boys in high school, how fast did you find one to sneak around with?”

She snorted and he was surprised, thinking he’d heard all her noises--but not in joy. Not in laughter, he hadn’t.

“You make me sound like I led him underneath the bleachers and deflowered him. No, I found someone sweet who would hug me. A few chaste kisses after we got off the bus. I was a good girl, John, because ultimately she trusted me. And, of course, my dad wasn’t fooled at all.”

He was studying her face closely like he was checking for a sort of confirmation and once he found it, said, "Your father was kind."

"Kinder than anyone I've ever met," she said. A confession from her felt fitting when it was about how wonderful her dad was. A big, gruff, soft-spoken bear of a man who'd never raised his voice or his hand to another person in his life, "Definitely kinder than anyone _you've_ ever met. And he came to say goodnight one night right when Dylan and I had just broken up--oh, I was 15 and thought my heart was in pieces--and he took one look at my face and went to get my mom."

John said nothing, his silence welcoming her to continue.

"I was too upset to be scared that she was going to find out I'd been dating someone. And when she came into my room she brought a bowl of apple slices with a glob of peanut butter right in the middle and I cried while she patted my knee. Mom wasn't touchy," she said in an aside, laughing lightly, confiding helplessly a memory that she treasured, "And when I grew quiet and calm, she pushed my hair behind my ear and she said, 'That's what happens when you don't listen to your mother.'"

She laughed wetly, remembering the rare and teasing softness in Bahar's voice, the way she had always made things okay by treating them like they were nothing special.

June bowed her head and looked at her borrowed jeans. They were dark wash and she almost didn't realize the delicate damp circles on her legs that grew in number the longer she leaned over them. In speaking, she'd remembered what it was like to be with someone who looked at her like she was perfect just the way she was. Who thought she should be proud of who she was without altering a thing.

John Seed was trying to force a Becoming onto her like she was raw clay. As if she had come to this county a completely blank slate with no personality except for her ability to pick up a weapon and defend herself against people who came at her like she was a blight on this earth. Who kept screaming at her that she needed to be fixed or put down like a feral dog. She resented their assumptions and she resented John's excitement as he frightened her. How he thought he was doing her some giant favor she just didn't have the comprehension to understand yet. She resented that her mother wasn't here, screaming in his face. That her father couldn't lift her in his arms and bring her home.

Because she wasn't an empty canvas. Not even close.

Her shoulders began to shake. She had cried plenty of tears between her capture and now, but it had been the weeping of a tired, terrified animal snapping at the bars which imprisoned it. This was the outpouring of emotional release that mourned for what was no longer--for what wasn't and would never be again, for how her she couldn't crawl in bed next to her mom and wake up to pancakes and _M*A*S*H_ reruns. 

She felt the tears roll down her cheeks. John Seed had made her remember all that the Whitetails and the Henbane and the Resistance's demands had sought to make her forget. 

John nudged his legs against hers, inching closer.

“I knew this would be the way. Because force will not break you, not how I need it to; softness will. Because you grew up loved, Juniper, and love touches you more easily than anything else. It’s shocking--I thought you were a monster of rage. Vermin.”

She flinched, helpless in her grief and what her hands had done to other people, something she would never have wanted Bahar to know, and before she knew it the ropes tethering her legs and arms were cut and she was lifted gracelessly but firmly against John.

He held her to him, her dirty curls tucked just under his chin as she was torn between flinging herself away and burrowing closer. She hadn't been this close to anybody in a nonthreatening context in--too long. Except for Peaches and Cheeseburger who she'd have done just about anything to curl around again and sleep for eternity.

"The end is coming," he whispered urgently, tightened his grasp on her like he was trying to push her inside his rib cage, "The Collapse is coming. You must believe that. We are trying to save everyone and they fight it, so we fight back. You have to believe it."

She raised a hesitant and shaking hand. Placed it on the <strike>SLOTH</strike> tattoo so worn and scarred on his chest. It was warmer than clothes fresh out the dryer. The indents of the letters felt like braille on her fingertips. 

At any moment, he could tie her to the chair again. He could leave her in the dark. Beat her. She should stop pushing, just let him have his moment of surrender--except.

"Sun," she insisted, "You promised."


	4. the mask that sings only dead languages, that loves the destruction of being put on

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A venture outside, daddy visits, and a moment of catharsis.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or the Modern Day Prometheus is quoted and so is a nice zinger of a line from the Book of Exodus.

June felt distinctly off-kilter walking through the compound as John led her through it. He was holding a rope attached to a secure knot binding her wrists in front of her. She took in her surroundings, the relatively compact encampment feeling large and fascinating after so much time staring at the same dank walls.

She took the opportunity to scan over all of Eden's Gate's followers who were milling around doing chores. They were a bit harder to look at. They were dirty, scuffed like an old pair of shoes. All of the Peggies wore shirts that were a material that wished it was linen, but was much closer to sack cloth. 

They wore no colors and there was nothing to distinguish them from the vessels they’d been turned into, though meeting Penny had made her realize that underneath it all they were still people. Just...what had they given up, to be here with the Seeds?

There was so much to be freaked out by--the clothes, their tendency to shoot anything that drove past them on the road, and horrible choral music that played 24 hours a day on the radio. Baptized by John, trained by Jacob, drugged by Faith, and mind-fucked by Joseph--she honestly wondered what was left of these people. 

And it had been easy to kill them. Behind her eyes, she saw them fall like dominoes underneath the hale of her bullets. She heard their screams and she had to admit that as much as her death-dealing tore her up, the kind of guilt she felt over it was odd--like she felt bad about killing the same person over and over again instead of feeling guilty for killing many different people. 

Watching them fortify their base, watching them lug around heavy boxes full of who-fucking-knows-what, and watching them converse quietly until they noticed her and John moving past and then tracking her movements with wary, hardened expressions was positively uncanny. Like watching toy soldiers dance ballet.

John had made clear her ground rules: stay quiet, do not speak to his people, and do not make any attempt to attack. He didn’t have to say there would be a punishment for her to know that consequences would be swift and harsh.

Lost in thought, she must have lagged behind a bit because there was a light tug on the rope, pushing her forward the slightest bit, and she thought she caught the slight curve of a smile on John’s face. She realized he was proud to have her so docile in front of his followers. He was parading her around like a lioness on a leash. It hit her in the chest how great for his image this was, how his siblings were likely to hear of this a hundred times over, the Resistance terror of Hope County, all dirty hair and haunted eyes being led around like John’s newest pet.

And despite it the weather was gorgeous. It had to just be entering August, a coolness present in the breeze that brushed over her like an old friend. She was more trapped than ever, but walking beneath the clouds and the sun--hearing birdsong and the buzz of busy insects--severed a bit of the dissociative hell she’d been in since her introduction to the bunker's torture chamber. 

Her skin still held warm undertones, but it was sallow. Sickly. She flexed the wiry muscles in her arms. Even with a lack of nutrition and the effects of sleepless terror coursing through her, she felt stronger standing, her feet moving through the compound.

“Not glamorous,” John commented lowly to her, “But purposeful. They are as perfect as I could make them. Just like you will be.”

A lump in her throat bobbed like food that just wouldn’t go down.

“They look homeless,” she commented to him, “Is that a flaw in your system or is it by design?”

“The Collapse will not be pretty and we won’t have the same conveniences we do now. We are spoiled by the indulgence of modern age. There will be a great Reversal,” intoned John, passing by and patting the back of several of his followers, “Easier to accept that now as we prepare.”

They were still walking and the Peggies had at least pretended to go back to their tasks, though they couldn't help but turn John's way like sunflowers towards the sun. His people turned to look at him with childlike wonder and terrible fear in their eyes. They must have had lives once, before all this, but now they looked at John like he was going to save them. Or maybe flay them. 

“And that means they can’t wear regular t-shirts they owned anyway? Actual jeans? They could wash clothes in the river, but they don’t,” she argued the point because she’d been thinking it for weeks, “I don’t understand why they wouldn’t take care of themselves. Not like you do. You’re always so pressed and clean. You look like you carry a goddamn Tide pen around, John.”

He chuckled like he thought what she said was funny, looking completely at ease, but he yanked on the rope tying her to him and she stumbled, almost going down on one knee before she caught herself. 

There was something different about him and something different about her out in the open. It felt like there was an audience, as if all the people of the county were watching. And the sky, too, all the powers that be having turned their gaze onto her and her confessor.

“You’re funny,” he said snidely, “I can’t remember, were you as funny when you stuck a knife through Damien’s throat? He has a daughter, you know...well, _ had_.”

They were almost out. He couldn’t possibly think of taking her into the woods for her little play date with the outside world. That was stupid and it was reckless of him to think just because he’d dug his cunning fingers into some of the crack in her psyche that she wasn’t enough of a person anymore to take a chance when she saw it. Of course, that might've been exactly what he wanted. For all his noise and shadow games, he could be inscrutable at the intersection of his devotion to Joseph and his own individual desire for destruction.

“And what I want to know is how you’re quantifying guilt because Joseph told me an interesting story about how he murdered your infant niece in a hospital bed,” she countered, ignoring the powerful sting of remorse, “Because where does he fall, then, on the spectrum of fucked up you’ve placed me on?”

“Scheherazade,” he snapped, surprising her, “Be a good girl and don’t talk about The Father. His sins have been addressed.”

“That’s not my name,” she said, surprised that after his insistence to know it truly that he would return to a falsity she'd given out of spite and dark humor.

By this point they’d marched past the trucks being filled with supplies for what she imagined was dispersal throughout their outposts in the county, past the uniformed denizens of Eden’s Gate who looked at John with fear and respect and looked at her like she was already a ghost. 

They were making their way down the hill where John’s bunker had been built, the grass brushing against her legs through denim feeling like a piece of heaven. Long blades like slender animals rubbing up against her calves. John moved silently, his leather duster brushing over the tops of the grass like the wings of a gliding bird. 

He pushed her abruptly against a tree, which she personally thought was a cheap if effective move, and told her, “_But it is_. The name your parents gave you was before I bathed your face and quenched your thirst; before you cried out in front of me and before we washed ourselves in the blood of a cowardly sinner. The name you gave me is your new name. Juniper is just a memory that belongs to me now. Scheherazade is the name you gave yourself after I washed your body clean.”

She stared him down. Out in the light, she saw the lines around his eyes, his mouth. He looked like a man possessed, though, for all that the skin seemed lived in. Something about the eyes hinted at the rivers of Hades--Styx and Acheron as blue and wretched as the rings of his pupils. Shining and tempting to the thirsty dead.

It was how he worked, forcing something onto her and telling her she did it to herself.

She swallowed.

The worst part was that she realized this might be the only avenue available for him to show kindness because he knew shades of cruelty well enough to know how soft it could be, a twisted interpretation of caring for someone he sought to collar.

She said gently, “You’re not clean. Not even nearly.”

And when he went to lay his hand at her throat, she flinched away, turning her head. She did not want his fraudulent comfort. All the things she saw within him, the kindred spark of intelligence she could feel like a weight in her chest. How he could argue morality with her, but all the floors in his bunker were covered in blood.

He stared at her. Searchingly, as if she was a map spread over a table. One hand held the rope attached to her bound hands. The other pushed a curl behind her ear.

“I will baptize you as many times as it takes for you to understand,” he murmured to her, with a small but significant distance between them.

She was surprised by how little he'd pushed up on her because her initial (and continued) impression was that he loved the power discrepancy between a follower and a Herald. He wasn't benevolent. He was too bloodthirsty for benevolence, which at first had made her think he would cross lines that he simply hadn't. He got close to her and breathed her in and trained her to accept his brief touch to her neck and intimidated the hell out of her, but that was it.

She had two theories about it: that his manipulation didn't extend to sexual violence because he couldn't stomach it or because it wasn't a form of control he was interested in. But when he was near her, whether by deliberate choice or by earnest desire, she thought he was really trying to see her in her entirety. 

An interruption startled them both.

“This is what I wish to see, John,” said a clear voice behind them, “Compassion for the broken is how you should proceed with my flock. I have been hoping for this from you for a long time.”

John froze, something like apprehension in his eyes when they met hers, like they were two kids caught playing after their bedtime.

Joseph Seed was standing in the grass behind them, seemingly alone though she’d hazard a guess there were several of Jacob’s hunters posted in the area. After all, nothing was allowed to happen to Eden Gate’s precious prophet. She’d never wanted so badly to stick a knife in someone’s eye.

He looked dazed and sun-soaked as a man hearing voices in August, the tan of his belly blending perfectly with the fine golden hairs on his chest and the crown he wore in ink. He was beautiful the way something too aware of itself could be beautiful. She could see he thought much of his own authority. She could tell he was attempting to appear ethereal, but it was clear he was going for an edgy youth pastor vibe. One who had a thigh holster for his gun and a swagger. 

And it was going poorly for him.

This fucking...fashion disaster. This crazy, ranting shit-heel was the reason for all of this pain. She had a hard time believing he didn't smell constantly of decay. Of rot. Stinking like the urine-soaked fear of the defenseless. She thought he was a fraud, but he was apparently a good one. 

In comparison, it was actually John who seemed more otherworldly. More the monster, more like the angels of old who had six menacing wings and two golden smiting fists. Where Joseph tried to look the part, John inhabited his body like a weapon masquerading as a man. That was to be expected, though, of someone who was largely unafraid of physical harm.

“Father,” John said, “I wasn't expecting you. Scheherazade and I have been working on an understanding. I have purified her in part. She will be ready for your Garden soon, rest assured.”

Nothing in his voice gave away the way he looked at her. How he seemed to try to twine around her vertebrae and her fingers and toes. Her knees round as peaches and her thighs, spreading upwards like he was tying her to something she wouldn't be able to rid herself of. 

She felt him everywhere and she felt her own impotent rage and she heard Joseph’s voice circle around them. She heard the rustle of bushes as if a family of deer had just been scared off. Yes, Jacob’s hunters had to be here, surrounding them.

She remembered, all at once, how Joseph had done the equivalent of threatening to exile John if he didn't convert her. It had been strange then and was even stranger now--to see a man so poisoned by hatred and violence as John Seed bow to someone else. To sheathe his claws in deference.

She didn’t like it.

She was only just finding her footing with John and as much as she hated the thing he was in so many aspects, she could see the strength in him. The dirty work he waded through while Joseph threw the weight of his own goddamn judgement around like a crude bag of bricks. 

“Scheherazade?” Joseph intoned solemnly. Pleased. Surprised.

“A name she chose for her baptism,” John explained, skimming the line of her jaw with his thumb while she glared at him and turning to face Joseph, “Not traditional for our faith, but nothing unheard of in terms of being born again.”

Joseph grinned broadly, appearing for all a doting brother happy to see his sibling doing well, “I acquiesce to your expertise in this matter. Scheherazade, come here.”

June did not want to take another step closer. It was awful and it was demeaning, but she felt lied to by the Baptist. All those days just the two of them, him making her feel like she was the only person in the world--whether to pet or torment--and now he was shoving her towards his brother. Rougher than she expected. Joseph didn’t seem bothered by the careless treatment.

He knelt in front of her, but she knew who was in control. That’s what the men of the Seed family did, try to pretend that _you_ were the one who thought you were tiny, helpless creature by treating you like you were. Some small part of her noticed that John made no mention of her true name and she didn’t know whether she felt an ugly gratitude over the concealment or if she was horrified at the thought of his insistence about her rebirth.

“Do you think you are John’s, child? You have the look of a bird pushed out of its nest,” he said with a humor that stoked her fury, “You should know that everything in John’s possession belongs to me. I am the one who will save all your souls. The Voice does not lie.”

“Interesting you’re the only one who can hear it then,” she replied dryly. A noise behind her reminded her that John was listening, taking notes, and was most likely going to review them with her in excruciating detail later. 

_ Come what may_, she thought, The moment she’d seen Joseph a feeling had come over her. Like rocks jostling in the tender bowl of her stomach. There was a large chance she wasn’t making it out of this alive. All the ridiculous thoughts she had about him, all the scathing commentary, and he still leaned over her existence like the Crone, scissors poised to snip her thread.

It was freeing, the knowledge that ultimately she had no control over her survival when she was bound, especially when Joseph’s mouth tightened. His anger was more transparent than either of his brothers, cloaked only in a pious veil of superiority. Jacob didn't seem capable of anger, which had been shocking at first, and John let you know he was angry when he felt it was a necessary force to unleash.

But Joseph. Joseph had too much ego and too much insecurity to be opaque. It was satisfying to see his reaction to her prodding.

He said, “You know not what you speak, child,” and she fucking _cackled_.

He was so used to spouting that patriarchal, papa-knows-best bullshit all these country bumpkins had probably grown up with, but not her. It just made her contemptuous and argumentative. No matter how guilty she was of mass murder, the sliver of strength in her was all Bahar. The understanding of what a man was supposed to be was all her father. Joseph was an orphan who'd watched other people closely and took notes and acted how he thought he was supposed to. Half a person, pretending to be whole.

Well, too fucking bad for him.

She sneered, “Just because you look like Passion of the Christ Jesus doesn’t mean you fucking are.”

And when Joseph’s eyes flashed something deadly and well-concealed, like glimpsing the shape of a whale in the ocean as lightning struck, she found herself pulling at her wrists--knowing they wouldn’t give but unable to bring herself to stop trying. If she lived, she lived.

If she died, well, someone would have informed Joseph Seed of things about himself he should've heard years ago.

“And I will tell you one other thing,” she bit out, an unknowing echo of beautiful Bahar at her angriest, “Even if the end is nigh and hell spilleth over and whatever else bullshit gibberish keeps your groupies coming back for more, you aren’t doing one, single, selfless thing for _the souls_ of Hope County. You’re afraid to be alone. You're afraid to be a regular, powerless man. You just want to be _right_. You can hide from yourself as much as you want, but I see the shape of you, Joseph Seed, and it looks an awful lot like pride.”

John’s hand clamped down on the back of her neck the way a tigress snatched up its cub during a tussle. He shoved her into the dirt and without the use of her hands she went down hard, her cheek and temple thankfully hitting grass and underbrush instead of the impact of unforgiving ground. 

“Apologize,” John demanded, incensed and probably embarrassed if she had to guess. 

But she was good and mad now, practically sizzling, and anger seemed to be what they expected from her. It was fine and good for them to be wary but excited when she wielded what they thought was the masculine rage of war. But the second she started chastising someone with emotion instead of acting like a wrecking ball, suddenly she was an unruly threat to be silenced. 

She huffed, quiet and amused, and said, “The only thing I will apologize for is not snatching those fucking aviators off when I had the chance. They look,” and she locked eyes with the Father with a face feminine and feral and scornful, “_so _ stupid on you.”

Joseph stared back at her with eyes she knew were blue but that looked positively black from her vantage point. Like he was filled with some ancient power that was barely holding itself back from striking her from existence. It was a rare moment when she saw the fantastical darkness in him. Usually, she hardly believed it existed.

He shook his head, “The Voice says we need you, though I cannot fathom why. You choose to be this _ thing_.”

He spat on her, saliva sinking in the hair crowning her forehead and he delivered one swift kick to her recovering ribs. The sound she made was barely human. 

“It’s going to be you and I at the end. This I promise,” he vowed, “‘I would bestow every benefit upon him, with tears of gratitude at his acceptance. But that cannot be; the human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union.’”

“Bastard,” she gasped, surprised and appalled at the reference, “Those words are not for you.”

He smiled, a small mean thing, when she recognized what he was quoting. _Frankenstein_ had never left a mouth so vile for so vile a purpose and she hated him for dragging it into their conversation. He spoke to her with the monster's mouth--the victim who had been made of cadavers' flesh and unfeelingly abandoned--and not the vile doctor who created him. 

His vision was skewed. It disgusted her.

How he got off quoting Mary Shelley at her, she didn't know. Maybe John had told him about her love for reading. Maybe John had told him a lot of things--fuck, of course he had and she _knew_ that. But it was one thing to intellectually realize it and quite another to see it in action.

To witness Joseph Seed wielding words against her, knowing how hard they'd hit. How dare he act like a monster made a pariah by the world when he was just another man trying to control it. 

She wanted to keep arguing, but he’d already walked away. He was in deep conversation with John as she lay there, sprawled out and hurting and ready to wrestle a bear. She was left watching the man who’d made himself the swirling, tempestuous center of her world speak with what he seemed to believe was the center of his. She was the center of no one's world now, her mother gone and her father who'd wasted away to nothing. 

The Seed brothers had each other to turn to; it was disturbing to behold.

She thought better of pushing herself up from the grass where they’d left her, watching instead as Joseph pressed his forehead to John’s in one of the most sanctimonious expressions of affection she’d ever witnessed. 

When Joseph walked away without a glance back, John returned to her in a blaze of temper.

“You are determined to lock us both out of the Garden, little girl,” he informed her. 

He turned her over, but kept her laid flat. Knelt beside her and slammed his hands on the ground beside either side of her face. Leaned in so he could fully express his displeasure.

“You are the key to the kingdom for me, the rook and the queen on my chessboard. If you want to live,” he snarled at her, cold and jagged, “You will obey.”

She’d never seen him so cross--not during the torture, the questions, Damien the Chosen, the tattoo, her fake name and her true one. They’d been through much together, battled in a little pain bubble of his making for them to exist in.

And it was now that she was glimpsing something in him which was not only vulnerable, not only vicious, but desperate and wanting and fed up. With her. With himself. Probably with Joseph, though she knew he would not voice it.

John pulled her up from the ground with his face flushed, the blush of hating her and possibly his situation with his brother spreading down his exposed throat. Deliriously, she thought he might be red beneath his beard, and she was shaken not by his loss of control but by his lack of articulation.

The man she’d come to know loved to broadcast; he announced, he declared, and his hands moved along with his proclamations as if they were trailing behind them like brightly colored banners. The man in front of her said nothing beyond his initial angry berating snaps at her, only swallowed compulsively as his Adam’s apple bobbed in his neck and his eyes got brighter and brighter.

Anyone else and she would have said they’d caught a sudden fever, but the gleam in his eyes was from--everything, the things she knew about and the demons she didn’t. His past and his present, boiling over the rim of him and she was the only one there to bear the brunt of it.

After staring at her silently for a couple minutes, he got up and dragged her with him and immediately began his way back to his bunker, pulling her along effortlessly and with no consideration for her. He expected her to follow and, barring that, he expected her to be dragged along until he could place her right where he wanted her.

John pulled a radio out of an inner pocket of his coat, snapping, “Terry, you will ready a truck for my use. Over.”

After that it was only the sweet whoosh of the wind and her sharp intakes of breath whenever he picked up the pace or made no indication of the sharp rocks that he bypassed easily, completely unrestrained as he was, and how they would soon be obstacles to her. 

He wasn’t even enjoying it, hyper-focused on whatever was the next step in her outing. She was beginning to regret insisting on it.

It seemed Terry had picked up on his Herald’s mood and spread the word because no one made any attempt to speak with him when they entered camp again. There was another beat up, sturdy truck with the keys in the ignition and the engine running waiting for them. 

He pried the door open with too much strength and shoved her all the way across the seat to the passenger side, boosting himself into the truck as well and tying the rope connected to her hands around his waist. 

He caught her looking and flashed her a look of that chilled her to the bone. Sweat broke out on the back of her neck and her stomach turned. 

She was used to an angry John Seed railing against her. She was not used to this new, doubly inscrutable silent version of him.

The cult choir on the radio was singing another fucked up song about everyone dying but the saved and walking through their soulless ashes or something when John slammed his hand on the power button, shutting it off and plunging them into a tense silence.

June stared out the window, torn between screaming at him and trembling with uncertainty. When she glanced surreptitiously at him from the corner of her eyes, she saw his big hands gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles looked like white knobs beneath his skin. He stared straight ahead, not even acknowledging her.

“John--”

His voice rang out like a bell, “You will wait until we get there before you let loose your viper tongue.”

The fury flared again.

“I’ll do no such thing--”

“_Quiet_,” he roared and yanked the rope binding her forcefully. June was yanked away from the passenger seat and because the seat belts were long gone and she was unbuckled, and she fell into him. She pushed away from him and scrambled back over to her side of the cab again. It was like he was punctuating his anger with little shows of force, like she was a puppy to be chastised. It was not a pleasant feeling.

The Montana sky was darkening, the roads winding as John smoothly but quickly got them headed out to his destination. It was clearly somewhere he went frequently. When they pulled up to the clearing in front of the river, she had a moment of blinding and animal panic. Her vision went white and her blood pressure plummeted. If she'd been standing, she would've gone down hard. It didn’t occur to her that someone who had only ever been abused for his fears, having them would inevitably force him into moments of violence to process them.

And he was angry at her. And he was hurting.

Of course he was taking her to the river to baptize. He had promised her cleanliness and she’d humiliated The Father. He thought he might not be allowed into the new world, separated from his family for what he was being told was completely his fault. Ostracized not for what he did, but for who he was--the ultimate rejection you could receive from a loved one. 

He dragged her out of the truck like a misbehaving child and that’s when the panic caught up to her. She thought to shriek and throw herself to the ground, but they were outside and she had a fighting chance in the wild. Something in the air, fresh and breathable, made her willing to lash out. 

He was ranting at her as he pulled her resisting body closer and closer to the water's edge.

“You won’t drag us into hell. You won’t condemn us. We will rise together. Fifteen years of my life and now you are the hinge on which my salvation swings,” he told her in his confessor’s voice. It sounded like there were two of him speaking in tandem, the acoustics near the water stunning and stinging. 

He went to wade into the river when she dug her heels into the earth and used her body weight to yank the rope tied around his waist in her direction, unbalancing John and causing him topple into the muddy water near the river’s edge. 

John came up like a demon, but she pulled on the rope he’d tied around his waist and he stumbled again, now half on land. Before he got back up, she threw herself on him like a banshee, straddling his waist and bringing her tied twin fists down on his face, catching him in the eye.

“You’re fucking crazy! You fucking lunatic, you’re going to try to drown me again!” she yelled at him, fully convinced that he would try his hardest to hurt her in the water. That’s what the special trip was for, to bring her to a place and give her his most visceral review of what he thought of her actions with the Father. In that moment, there was no _her_ anymore, just like it had been when she was on her own in Hope County living only for the next outpost liberation. Living knowing there were Angels and Judges and Hunters and Chosen. Living scared, blacking out her whole self so that she could make it a few more minutes. A few more days.

Did he know what he'd done to her? She didn't know anymore. She didn't know anything but the rush of urgency fueled by self-preservation. She would not drown here, not held down by a Seed.

He bucked against her, but she gripped him with her thighs to steady herself. Half in the water and half out, his face turned into the shallow depths as he struggled and he gasped a breath full of river water. A vicious part of her hoped it tasted of all the sin he’d professed to have washed away there. Instead, as he choked, he somehow caught her fists and raised himself to flip her over and then he was a shadow of wrath above her. 

“That’s it,” he laughed, mean as a cottonmouth, “Let it out! Let out all that anger on someone who can take it! Not all those souls you put out like candles! Not all those saved bodies losing liters of the blood I purified as you sliced through them!”

It was madness and it was wet and they were both too out of control to do anything except hurt each other using their own separate pain like live steel clashing.

“They were trying to kill me,” she screamed back, so guttural she didn’t know if he could make out the words, all the fear and panic and resentment rancid on her tongue, “All you’ve done is try to kill me. Your fucking brother doesn't give a shit about me or Hope or you, John! He's fucking Satan, don't you get it?!”

“You will not speak of The Father that way!” he roared, shoving her face under the water. As before, she saw him through it but this time there was no peaceful smile. No blue eyes winking at her. He just looked upset. There was nothing to be savored by either of them here, at the water's edge on a beautiful evening in Montana.

When he let her up, probably assuming the fight had all but left her adrenaline-filled body, she screamed back, “Why can’t you just accept that you’re pissed off your big brother isn’t going to let you into heaven after all these years on a technicality? And now you’re here trying to drown me into making him less disappointed in you. _You fucking psycho_.”

A fucking feud within one insane family and suddenly it was June who bore the blame stemming from their inability to have regular relationships with each other. It was June who felt the lash of all their anger separately, like they were standing in line for their turn to take their frustrations out on her. The Father had made her their communal punching bag and then gotten upset when she'd risen to the occasion. 

And now they were screaming at each other while the Baptist was trying to forcefully baptize her. _Goddammit_. 

And even though she called him crazy, it was her who bodily flipped him back under her, water from the edge of the river where they struggled getting into both of their noses. It was messy, no finesse in their fighting, like they were both wild animals rabid with the hunt. It was her who leaned down and put her mouth on the <strike>SLOTH</strike> tattoo in the center of his chest and bit down until her teeth really sunk in and were sheathed by muscle and sinew and vein.

He thrashed and beat his hands against her head, but she was determined to return the torment he thought was his right to reign upon others. Upon her. Let him crack knuckles against her temple. She’d gotten her fangs into him. More pressure from her jaw and her teeth sunk in more; a howl bloomed from his throat.

She was lost in him. She could almost understand how he could enjoy his horrifying work coaxing confessions. Dealing with bodies could be a peaceful thing because bodies couldn't lie. And they couldn't be anything other than what they were. No matter how awful John could be, no matter his power over her and others, even he could bend and break under the onslaught of teeth. There was a vulnerability in that, the painful conversation of her body marring his body, which sated her like a filling meal. Like she had a merciless electricity inside of her, screeching black winds and rainfall and abyssal lightning, and he would have to accept it if she gave it to him.

There was finally a real punch to her right ear that had her howling right back. She pulled back, knew the entire inside her mouth was red as pomegranate seeds. 

“You’ve been Marked,” she whispered darkly to him, watching his wild eyes flicker between her dark eyes and her wet mouth. She felt urged on by the damage he’d dealt her like it was his fucking birthright. It wasn’t. He didn’t have a claim on her or her soul, though when she looked at him all her emotions scrambled into a color she’d never seen before. 

If he was going to kill her, it would have been in this moment and she thought she might not have minded so much, mashed together and the furthest away from composed she’d ever seen him. But he was down in the dirt and the mud and a couple inches of water, surely feeling the couple drops of blood which dripped from her mouth onto him and slid over the sides of his neck.

There was an ugly set of teeth marks on him, so deep they would surely scar, so deep he would have to carry them forever--and they created a sort of cage around the S and the L. It felt right, even with the scorching shame that swelled with her uncontrollable violence. She’d needed it. If they were ever going to get anywhere with each other. If she was ever going to learn to carry the marks he'd left on her.

He didn't kill her. He didn't rise up and throttle her exhausted body--from fighting his brother and him and the tug and pull of her panic--even though he could have. She expected him to, but he didn't. He seemed as exhausted as her, as wrung out as a towel, and he simply breathed and held still beneath her.

How long had it been since he'd been pliant and speechless before someone else's will? How long since it hadn't seemed like punishment to do so?

“Scheherazade,” he said quietly, the rage burnt clean out of him and a numb calm in its place, “Tell me your worst sin.”

There were no tears. No weeping. No sobs. She’d been a mess of crying in the bunker, but there was no room in her, at the river, for that soft self-pity. She knew what she’d done; something she was ashamed of, something that must have always been inside her, something she was thankful her mother would never have to witness.

“'I was a stranger in a strange land,'” she confessed through bloodstained teeth, quoting Exodus to him, “And I’ve murdered dozens upon dozens of people. I can’t remember half their faces.”

John stroked a hand up the wet shirt sticking to her belly and ribs. He seemed content to lie beneath her, not as though she’d just maimed him but remarkably like he was a pillar holding her up. A part of her foundation uncovering itself.

She thought when she finally told him of her ultimate guilt, he would gloat. Put on a song and dance for the newly converted. Parade her around the encampment like a witch being dragged to the stake. 

He did none of those things; he looked at her like she was the sum of all the stars, though she couldn't help but remember how he'd tossed her to his brother like raw meat. How he was _this_ and _that_. This person, that puppet.

“Tell me, Baptist,” she whispered, “Tell me you don’t miss bookstores and libraries and sushi. You could live like a real person. So many people don't have that option and yet you reject it.”

“I never lived a normal life,” he told her, “That was never in the cards.”

She shook her head and said, “No, no. I just want you to be a fucking person. With me. For two seconds, John.”

Tendrils of his black hair spread out in the water and the sun was dipping down fast, the wind growing cooler in its absence. He shivered once. Twice. Eyes like medallions on hers. She didn't know all it took to soften him was an equal and uninhibited exhibition of anger. That he would melt like butter if she showed him she wouldn't be pushed around and left him scarred in turn. Though she knew this wouldn't last, that this sliver of time was a weak spot in near-impenetrable armor and she knew he'd shake himself out of it soon enough--she needed something in return from him. A crumb of him broken, brought down low and keening.

“I never thought I’d meet someone like you,” he said and something cracked in her. Straight down the middle. 

It wasn't capitulation. But it wasn't nothing.

He kept trying to pry her open, cut her down the center and peel back her ribs to get at her insides. He was trying even now, beneath her in every way she could manage. The thing between them was too big to include anything they'd been fighting over; her fear of being murdered by him and his fear of being unable to convert her and remaining unaccepted by Joseph. They were matters of importance and they had _nothing_ to do with her leaning down to set her head on his chest, feeling the torn, irritated skin of his wound against her forehead. 

As they laid there, water lapped at their sides. The sun had slipped away like a thief and a crescent moon was rising in the east, pearly and opalescent and watchful.

"Likewise," she replied, her eyes burning as she squeezed them shut and listened to the crickets singing in the exquisite night air.


	5. pass me the rouged mask, the one made of sheet music

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Picking at each other like scabs, a grim fairy tale, and Penny knows a minefield when she sees one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Joon-am is a Persian endearment that means "my life," one of my favorites. No lit reference this time as Junie is spinning her own tale.

Laying on her enemy felt like giving into some powerful persistent force that kept asking and asking for her to rest as she struggled and bit and fought.

Until she couldn't anymore. Until she wouldn't.

He'd told her he wanted to remake her. He'd brought her here not out of piety, not out of faith, but out of a need to trespass. He wanted to cut her into a shape of his liking and his brother's religion offered crude but effective instruments for him to do so. He made her weak, made her mad, and simply waited for her to fold into him. Easy as a stack of cards crumbling.

At first he'd tried with pain, but he'd realized it was his mind that could truly reach across the divide between them. His beliefs were so American and conquering, but the conviction in him and the expression of his words were distinctly not of this place--she thought of how familiar his rhetoric was. How very Persian. 

He reminded her of home while being the antithesis of it. It was just his reliance on verbal expression, the way he leaned hard into his emotions, reminded her of Bahar. It was a helpless recognition. 

Her mother had emigrated without much English. She'd learned the language by immersing herself in it. She'd listened to the radio, she'd watched American soap operas, she'd practiced in the mirror with her full and unsmiling mouth until her Farsi's tongue wrapped around American words like "immigrant" and "peony" like soft tissue around chocolates. Bahar had known the first order of business in this new continent would be to capture the language. She'd made it her own. When she would enter a room, she took it over with her whole presence, her curling accent taking dominion of words like a charmer to a cobra. 

She twisted words in ways native speakers didn't know how to, with the aid of a scarlet and lush mother tongue guiding her to a new fluency. Growing up, June had hardly ever heard her say_ I do not like it_. Instead she'd say: _this is disgusting. Repulsive. I choke when I look at it. _

John spoke like that, similarly, unable to reign himself in when he was trying to get her to see what he saw. To know what he knew. Whether she agreed or not, she would listen as the words flowed out of him. He was like a vessel for a near-divine purpose he'd allowed to possess him. She knew what that looked like--knew what that felt like since the war she'd waged against Eden's Gate had made her filthy with carnage.

Which is why it was a real surprise--after all they'd been through today and how close they were pressed together and he was being quiet. 

It didn't sit well.

Their joint silence was difficult. It felt unnatural without his voice cutting through the air, the lash of him pushing her and pushing her like he trusted she could take it. It had become something, despite being borne of hatred and fixation, which was her companion in the darkness he'd plunged her in.

She'd begun to crave it.

Her chest pressed into his flat stomach, the water molding them together, and she only wanted to be closer. His wound was hot and irritated against her forehead, burning like the impact of a meteorite and proof that she'd changed him. Left a mark on him he hadn't asked for and couldn't erase. 

He couldn't be silent now. June wouldn't _allow_ it; after weeks of being pushed to the brink and she'd only just found the cliff of him.

He'd tried to make her his creature, sutured badly by obsession, but he didn't know she'd been raised by a woman who had weathered learning a new language and living a new life and having nothing and no one else to make things work except her own force of will. A woman who had whispered so many words in her ear about survival since she'd been a little girl that they were etched invisibly into her flesh and the Baptist couldn't see it. 

Her mother was the first voice in the darkness. John just didn't realize it.

_When someone hits you_, she could remember Bahar saying when she'd come back from the first day of first grade with a red swollen cheek and a trembling lip, _you will hit them back twice as hard. Don't let them think it's you who will hurt the most if they strike you. _

And here she was--as alone as her mother flying across an ocean, the rubies and pearls of a language on her tongue that would do no good in her new home, knowing she was the one at a disadvantage--taking what was thrown at her with nothing with but a steely clenched jaw and open receiving palms. 

Her mother was saying, _Adapt to spite them all, joon-am, you are water flowing over rock_, and like a jarring echo of Bahar's hard forceful instructions was John's dulcet pitiless voice saying, _The best gift isn't the one you get; it's the one you give._

And he gave them to her all the time, badly wrapped and earnest and fucking brutal, but they were sentences and crooning, ugly phrases. He'd crawled into her head and he was at the base of every firing synapse and she was finally ready to return that fervor. With something gentle, with something wicked.

She was ready to break his game with honesty. Ready to admit that he wouldn't be playing with her for this long if he was actually playing. He'd taken no one else to the river like this, let them attack him and then lay on him in an exhausted heap.

She had to break through his haze of torture and touching and say what she knew: that he didn't want to let her go for a reason.

"Where are your words now?" she asked him, emotion cracking her voice, "You never stop talking."

She felt his big hands, as pale as moonlight and snowdrops and white as all the men who'd ever scared her, drift up her ribs like mist rolling through mountain valleys. She could smell him: bergamot, sandalwood, heat, earth. Had she ever been so close to a man, especially one who was broad enough to crush her to henna? She'd thought moving states would mean meeting someone, but this isn't what she'd meant at all.

Meeting him wasn't something she'd anticipated.

"There are no words for this," he told her, grasping her sides and pulling her up the length of his body in a languid drag so that they would be eye to eye. Chest to chest. Hip to hip. 

When he looked at her, she thought so much of the things Bahar had told her over the years. It was present in him, her exaggeration and her fervor and her belief in giving your life to your people and your causes. The loving so hard it was a matter of life and death. How Persian women told their children not _I love you_, but _I would die for you_.

John had dragged her to the edge of pain, but it was his mouth which followed her everywhere and the prolific insistence of his gaze. And part of her hated it, the way she understood his need to lay out words like a tapestry.

It was nothing she wanted, but it was something she couldn't deny: John Seed and Bahar Landry had overlapped. Two people who'd had heavy hands in her construction, one that she loved and one that she saw whenever she closed her eyes. They were the two voices she heard in her dreams, so different from each other but she felt them in the dizzying rush of her blood, the bold and wary thud of her pulse. 

He had done a number on her if the most important woman who had ever lived and his haunting, insistent voice were so intertwined within her, so tangled up in the deep roots of her consciousness, she couldn't hope to separate them.

"I don't know who's broken who," she admitted, the roughness in her voice as coarse as sea salt, "And I don't know how important that question is anymore."

He gathered her to himself and it shook the leaves of her, made the forest of her shiver in its entirety, that they had spent the day raging against each other and he had gained the ability--had instilled the response, it must have been, it could be nothing else, surely it wasn't her who needed this--to quiet her. 

"Shh, shh. It's just kept promises," he spoke into her hair, fingers grasping at the little curls at the base of her neck not as though he was holding a leash but like he was cupping every fragile thing he'd found and crushed in her. As though he treasured it even as it cracked like glass at the repetitive strike of his fists, "I will always keep my promises to you. It's not my nature to do otherwise. As long as you continue to exceed expectations, I will continue pulling the venom from your blood and there is so much of it, Scheherazade."

To any other man, to any other woman, maybe they'd have looked out on the water or caught sight of the moon as wide and liquid as a blown pupil. They might've heard the call of owls beckoning death omens and the skittering night creatures with curling fingers who climbed the trees and waited for prey with a crouched and laser focus. It was a night for a bonfire party or a night to gallivant through town, the wind fluttering softly and a slight nip wherever it touched skin. 

But they were not other people. They saw nothing outside of their pressed bodies, no night song or moon song or water song. 

Juniper didn't know what to do except that it seemed like now that she'd cracked open in wrath and terror, she could not stop pouring out as though it was her chest which had been punctured. He'd been trying to make her talk for so long that it was a surprise that now she couldn't stop.

But she was done with holding back. Her chat with the Father had proven that. So had her screaming match with a madman.

"You remind me of her, sometimes," she said simply, her bound arms having looped over his head when he'd pulled her up. Because of his semi-frequent wash downs with hand towels, she smelled inoffensive, like a regular person--salt and outside and wind--nothing that would bother either of them with her arms lifted. 

He was so warm. The sparse hair on his chest and the scratch of the hairs on his arms brushed against her skin and damp clothing and a liquid, golden feeling collected below her navel as her ribs pushed against the solid muscle of his torso with every breath.

It occurred to her how small she was in comparison to him.

"Remind you of whom, exactly?" he asked idly as a hand slid down the curve of her back and swept back up, warming her or learning her. Something in between. 

She laughed, a sound full of disbelief, "Like her. My mother...you speak like her. Any Persian blood in you, Seed? You swear like one. You make oaths like one. You are relentless," and she paused because it felt like a bell was tolling in her thoughts and she couldn't hold them back, "When I look at you, I want to see what you would have been if your brother hadn't found you. I want to send you to a deserted island where you never hurt anyone ever again. I want you to hold my hand. I want to rip you out of me like a tick."

It was more than Juniper had ever revealed, but she was tired of being a mere participant. Tired of being a toy that spoke in response to his prodding.

He seemed to be returning to normalcy, the energy which had been wrung out of him beginning to return, the gleam of his eyes reigniting. 

"I can't tell if you're berating me or not, but you're getting closer to absolution," he said, breaking into a broad, manic smile, "Soon you'll be Eden's. You'll walk through heaven's gates with me."

His grin was horrific and she shook her head.

"No, all you've done is make me see _you_. Not the Project. Not your brother. But isn't that what you wanted?" she asked directly, "To climb into my head. But I am no stranger to conflicted emotions. You know, instead of sweet endearments, my people say _ghorboonet beram_ \--'I will destroy myself for you'--because the only love worth knowing is one where you give all of yourself. Past death, even."

John sat up then, taking her with him and crawling up on solid land. He had begun to breathe harder, heavier, pushing her onto the grass and leaning over her. 

He pressed his mouth to the line of a collarbone and mused, "Past death, I like that. Isn't that the only way we ever want anything, by watching it die to be reborn in our shadow?"

"Is that the only way anyone ever wanted you, John?"

He lifted his head and met her eyes, something in him looking like he had was lit up and present. Like all the Project scripts weren't sufficient for this conversation, like he had to switch on his brain and think around her. The thing between them too personal and too risky, but happening nonetheless.

He asked, "Have you noticed you talk about everyone but yourself? Your parents, Whitehorse, Hudson, Joseph. Me. But never Juniper--the junior deputy, the friend, the daughter. I wonder why that is. Do you think no one could want you?"

And it struck her like a hammer that past the pain of memories and lost lives, they were beginning to know each other. Their present selves who were so much harder to pin down than the selves they could talk about like they were other people, living distant different lives, people who they used to know but who were gone now. He wasn't just mining her for memories or digging for coffins of sin. 

He saw her, somehow.

"Do _you_ want me?" she asked him, tired of having less than nothing. Too used to reading between the lines. John Seed was all subtext when you got past the sermons and hellfire.

His eyes were catlike and considering and concealing, "I don't think that quite describes it," but his arms had clenched and unclenched like he was holding himself back.

She knew not through instinct but through familiarity and understanding--knew the way she knew how to fix a tire, how to hold a child by supporting its little spine along her forearm--how to burst his hidden self. She'd found him. Somewhere, somehow, she'd found a piece of him. She kept thinking it would disappear the second she looked away, but it hadn't yet.

To hold onto that piece, she was willing to make a gamble.

If she gave into despair, she'd drown in him and lose herself. She would doubt his motives and her value and she'd lose any kind of original thought that had ever sparked in her brain. She would be a corpse walking around, jumping when John said jump; his little olive-skinned doll. Not ever having known the tenderness that came after anger. Not ever having pushed to be touched in a way that elicited something that wasn't harsh or unyielding.

He couldn't control what she wanted from him. He couldn't control what she asked for. 

So she would ask for exactly what she wanted even if it scared her.

_You will destroy yourself for me_, she thought, could see the effort it took for him not to devour her. She wasn't stupid enough to think that she'd be free one day to find a partner. Wasn't stupid enough to think he'd undo the his steel chains and his climbing ivy vines and his silk ribbons from her arms and legs. It had become second nature, for her to tug at them and feel how they wouldn't give an inch.

"You can have me," she informed him, unknowingly sweet, lifting her chin in stubborn pride, "But this isn't a one-way street."

-

John had pulled her from the water like she was a stray petal floating on its smooth and undisturbed surface. She felt numb from her own admission, muffled, as though he’d pushed her further beneath the water instead taken her clean out of it. 

Juniper was soaked from head to toe, as was John, and she sighed at the thought that her hair had at least gotten wet. It wouldn't untangle the rat's nests of her curls over days and days of unwilling neglect, but perhaps it could be the thinnest of silver linings in a giant, hulking rain cloud. 

John had gotten them both up and half-carried her to the truck. He’d even left the radio off during the trip back to him base, instead humming some old Louis Armstrong song June was surprised she was vaguely familiar with. 

Staring out the window, listening to his wispy humming, she turned to get a good look at him. Saw him notice her watching him.

His skin was flushed even after he’d regained his calm--well, as calm as he ever got--and was driving one-handed, the ink on his fingers like shadows clinging to him as he gripped the wheel, his other hand easily wrapping around her bound wrists. Like he was holding her in place. 

Like he was reminding her of where she belonged. The pad of his thumb was signing a circle into one of her palms and as when she turned from staring out the window to look at his face, she saw him exhale a shaky breath, the tendons in his throat tight. He could pretend all he liked that what he felt for her was a paltry, uncomplicated lust he could restrain, that it was her mind alone that he wanted to bend and mold, but now that she was being honest it was no hardship to admit that he'd never been good at keeping away from her. 

_You can have me_, she'd said, untried and untouched but opening up the door to a new kind of war. The want in his eyes, the obvious effort it took him to simply pull her off the ground and into the truck and to keep them apart, made her swallow. She could vividly remember the way his fist felt battering her stomach, the way it felt when he wiped the grime and sweat and tear tracks he'd caused off her face, but once she'd started talking he'd begun listening.

Her life until him had been her own. Not mundane, but magical simply in the everyday sense of watching her aloe vera plants grow or learning to knit wool socks after months of botched attempts. Juniper knew herself; Juniper had known herself. She'd always thought she wanted a silent, strong man--someone like her father. Someone who didn't grip her heart in a tightening fist and watch hungrily as it struggled to beat despite the constriction.

“I don’t think anyone’s ever bitten me before,” he said ponderously, his mouth a smile or a grimace.

They pulled past the bunker gates suddenly. Juniper hadn't been aware they'd returned. As he was parking, she thought to respond.

“This was definitely the second time you’ve tried to drown me,” she said, seething and weirdly moved and feeling horribly, inextricably connected to him. Like they’d brought each other to death’s door--him as helpless as her and that felt _so good_\--and then turned to walk back into the light of the living.

John’s freakishly blue gaze caught hers for a frozen moment before dragging her over the seat to exit the truck through the driver's side, tugging her to the entrance and beginning to weave through his labyrinthine bunker, shrugging, “All in the name of righteousness.”

He seemed calm again, but she wasn't fooled.

She’d heard things. From the different regions' militias. That he was the lawyer, the wealthy sibling, the bank-roller, the man who cleansed.

When she tried to rip a chunk out of his flesh, she’d come to realize that all the captivity, all the helplessness he was trying to force her into, all the craving for love and attention hidden deep within her--it wasn’t just making her face herself; it was teaching her how to face him. 

They were similar, in the things they wanted. In the ways they wanted them. 

And she wanted him the way he wanted her: supplicant, vicious, her soul singed to ash as she cried out for him. 

“Righteousness?” she scoffed in a raspy voice evidencing the yelling she’d done today, “No, I think we know each other a little too well for that lie now.”

Instead of leading her to the chamber deep in the belly of his nightmare labyrinth, he took her to a room on an empty hallway she’d never seen before. Inside was somewhere between a cell and a sad facsimile of a bedroom. He pulled her in quickly before shutting and locking the door behind them.

The only light in the room was coming from the saddest lamp she’d ever seen right in the corner. 

“You know the John from the scripture. A character in a book I had no part in,” he told her as he sat her on the cot and went over to the sink in the corner where there was toothpaste and a toothbrush and a towel waiting for him. Waiting for him to attend to her. 

"Since when do you talk shit about Joseph Seed?" she questioned, taken aback.

"The Father, I dedicate my life to," John vowed solemnly and then made the wry aside of, "But any related literature is free game. I was an English major in undergrad. I know amateur writing when I see it. See? You don't know me at all."

It was the first fact about John Seed freely given that had nothing to do with his past or his abuse or his tiresome lecturing. It was a fact about him. Just him, no cult-y strings attached. She didn't know what had gotten into him, why he seemed so himself and so not himself.

But Juniper had offered him her body; it felt right that he would offer something in return. 

“I know the John from the river,” she told him fiercely, surprised at how upset she was becoming at his deliberate choice to distance himself from her, “I know the John who made me spill a man’s blood that ran over our intertwined fingers. I know the John who’s probably read every book known to man. Don't pretend like you do this with everyone.” 

John laughed, eyes crinkling in a genuine show of emotion that surprised her, and snapped, “Will you ever learn your place?”

“I do know my place,” she said, “And my place is here, telling you stories. I have another for you. Don’t you want to hear it?”

She was docile as he placed his hand on her throat, swallowed hard around his grip and the Latin inked along the bones of his fingers. He brushed her teeth and he watched as she swallowed down the toothpaste before he could let her spit it out. The mint felt ceremonial. Like she was being cleaned on the inside, too. 

John had spent the entire time he was brushing her teeth staring at her eyes and her mouth and tracing the outline of her hair. Afterwards, when he wiped her cheeks and her shoulders and her neck with a wet towel, his pupils had grown big and expansive as black holes.

Heat pooled in her belly.

She was aware of how wrong--and strange--and horrifying--it was for her to want him. But she needed the connection and of all the people she'd met and helped and saved, it was him who seemed to actually want to be near her the most. She could give into that, complicate their interactions and lead him further into whatever he saw her as. 

June wanted to know what that was, exactly, if she was a temptation because she was dangerous, deemed Hell by Joseph Seed, or because they recognized something kindred in each other. He obviously wanted her to make it past the conversion period. 

“Don’t you want to hear it, John?” she asked again, feeling more herself than she had in months. She’d never spoken to a man like this, but the fact that it was her choice to do so was heady. 

Whatever she saw in his eyes, he must have seen in hers. 

“Yes,” he hissed, pushing her back on the cot. She was laid out width-wise, her legs spread at the edge of the cot as John leaned between them, a hand planted beside her head as the other trailed from her neck down to her borrowed cotton t-shirt, rucking it up to drag his fingers up her stomach.

The light touch made her shiver, viscerally aware for the first time of her own inexperience. The face he made let her know he’d felt every involuntary shake of her body and how pleased he felt over her reaction.

She tried to center herself. The Seeds had made her a killer. John had made her a killer.

Maybe it made sense that he would stoke other fires in her, if only because he’d supplied the firewood and kerosene and the match himself. The Seeds had made her a monster of rage and vengeance. Why wouldn’t one of them make her a specter of lust, ready to be filled if she could not receive any other satisfaction?

She began, “Once there was a little boy who would one day be written about by his brother--”

Juniper choked on a gasp as John’s fingers slipped beneath the underwire of her bra and swiped a slow, dragging swipe against the underside of her breast. She realized as something inside of her seemed to tighten, unfulfilled, that she was getting wet.

John’s bright eyes, blue as a fever and cleaving her in half, were trained on her face. He smiled faintly, like he couldn’t help it, as he slipped his hand out from beneath her shirt and grabbed her bound wrists to raise them up above her head. They hung off the bed, but she kept them there, torn between the sweetest feeling of wanting more and the fiery desire to watch him fall beneath the onslaught of her bullets as he begged for his life.

Wires were crossing in her. Veins were knotting. She felt herself dripping and sticky and waiting for him to speak.

“You were saying, Scheherazade,” he murmured, prodding her like she'd stopped paying attention in class.

She coughed and kept on, “There was a little boy from a small town in Georgia. He had a family, but it wasn't much of one. His dad was a mean drunk and his mother was a ghost drifting through rooms, seeing nothing and hearing nothing. They couldn't teach him anything about love, so everything he knew, the boy learned from his brothers. They grew close, surviving together, like stray dogs huddling for warmth in an alleyway.”

She paused to take a breath and John raised his index and middle fingers to her lips. She found his eyes and she sucked them into her mouth, swallowed ungracefully around them but John let out a noise that sounded like it wasn’t a bad move. Like maybe she could have done it on purpose. 

She hoped that was what he believed, as she dragged her tongue along the underside of his fingers, wiggled it to separate his them and licked at the salty divide. Her cheeks hollow when she sucked at them hard. 

Juniper felt made of glass. Made of the elements, the air he breathed and the earth he walked on. The fire he commanded and the water he made his own instrument of control. She was all of those things, delicately. 

When he pulled his fingers free, the friction as they moved over her bottom lip made her back arch the slightest bit, seeking something she didn’t have the words for. His eyes were darker and his cheeks flushed, and when he looked at her, it was a little push to get her talking again.

John seemed hypnotized, clinging to her words and her body equally, commanding, “What happened to them?”

As if he didn’t know the ending to this one.

“They fell apart,” she told him, watched as his drying hair stayed thick and straight, messy and flyaway where each strand was usually so carefully slicked back, “They tried to be a family somewhere else, but they shattered. The little boy was given to two monsters who took him to their home and made him their scapegoat. The boy became an animal as they took away his heart and forced him to work like a mule in their poisoned fields. He--”

A heat rose up in her, unfurling like a rose, redder than blood and with every thorn tearing at her skin, as John flicked open the button to her work jeans and pulled down the zipper. She took another breath, but she was suddenly a whole field of flowers, stunned by her own violent blooming. 

His fingers slipped past her waistband and moved down until the fingers that had been wetted by her mouth traced the seam of her, every raised line on his fingertips moving over her like he meant to brand her with a shadow of pressure as he cataloged every flicker of sensation that crossed her face. She felt sweat begin to bead on her back, felt hot and deliciously trapped as her mind went blank.

She thought she could see her image in his eyes, a baptism through his irises and the dark wash of her damp wet hair spread over the new cot, as his hand moved. She stared at his perfect throat and broad spread of his shoulders, his soft lips surrounding by his beard and mustache. She didn't realize how yielding he could look. How young intimacy made him.

“Focus, Scheherazade. Focus for me. The little boy,” he mused in a voice deeper than what she’d heard from him, “What was his name?”

“John,” she whispered back and and let out a completely punch-out _ hahh _ when his fingers parted her and stroked an electric, soaking line right up to her clit where he began to rub easy, feathery circles into her that felt like an endless branding of heat, that felt like flames licking at her lungs. She didn't know if it was supposed to feel like that, if something was supposed to feel so scorching and sumptuous, like it was asking her to lay down inside a burning building.

“Say it again,” he told her, not one bit of anger or humor in his voice, and she did. He spoke to her without pretense, half of his face in shadow and the other half bathed in the dim amber light from the Salvation Army lamp near the opening of a shabby, shallow closet area. He looked like he was getting something out of this, a stutter in his rhythm as a deep breath shuddered through him before he started up again.

He drew his circles, which felt like they were orbiting a sun within her that grew brighter and hotter at his ministrations, before he pinched her clit and released it. The jolt of it stunning as he notched his thumb snug against her and began to work at her like he was testing the fineness of some precious powder. Like there was ground pearls or liquid gold staining him and if he just rubbed and rubbed and _ rubbed_, it would come out.

Her thighs which had cradled him spread further, the flex of muscles in her hamstrings a sweet pain. Between her legs was a mess of wanting him and his fingers and his blown pupils staring at her jeans where his hand was hidden and working away like he could see through the denim.

He was a monster and a false idol and a devil making deals at a crossroads and he felt very much like _ hers_, the fleeting ownership of sex spreading across her tongue like berry juice.

She arched and keened, her hands grasping at each other because there was nothing else to grip, as she tried to compose herself and ask, “What about--the story?”

His fingers moved down and he circled his fingers over her opening, dipping in a testing fingertip up to the second knuckle and listening to her make a low moan that sounded like it was coming from someone else. Someone unrecognizable. Someone who wanted this more than she wanted freedom.

He leaned into her space until his lips were skating along the bough of her jaw. Another noise built in her throat and her hips swayed into his hand. And again. And again.

“You couldn't finish it, just like this?” he asked, gravelly, and pulled her earlobe into his mouth.

Her eyes were heavy, languid and half-closed, as she replied, “I--no. I couldn't. I don't even remember where I was.”

John withdrew as easily as he’d found her. Curled his hand wet with her into a fist instead of wiping it on anything. She thought she could hear the thunder of his heartbeat with him so close and so wanting.

There was a long pause of conversation and movement as her breathing slowed, smoothed out, and she felt the sweat on the back of her neck cool. He swallowed convulsively a few times, absent of any expression she understood, and squeezed his eyes shut in a bid for composure.

When he opened them, he seemed somewhat more grounded. Like he wasn't a second away from stripping them both.

“The boy was born weak and made weaker,” he said, an unexpected confession, as his beard brushed against her cheek, a smudge of bristles and man at the crest of her cheekbone. She’d never felt softer than bracing herself against his irritation, the dark wall of his voice pressing her further under his guard, "That's where you were."

“The boy was just a boy. Not weak. Just...unprepared for barbarity," she said, turning her cheek firmly into him, “Is the only way you can feel close to someone by hurting them first?”

He closed his hand around her throat and watched her whole body go limp as it cooled from the fervor he’d stirred and she felt calmed. Soothed. 

He answered, “This isn’t what me hurting you looks like,” and he flexed his fingers like he was readjusting his grip.

Juniper didn’t quite know what to do with that. She was talking about their entire acquaintance, their first meeting on that awful night when she'd arrested the Project's prophet and the threatening video he'd made for her viewing and every time he'd tried to make her talk those first two weeks of capture.

They’d torn at each other like desert coyotes. He’d thrown her to his brother without hesitation. Those were things she couldn't forget.

She was aching and turned on and the first real tenderness he’d given her was right after she’d maimed him.

But what was pain to him, if not a door to walk through to get to other things? If not a vehicle to transport him to his desires? It made her question whether he could have done this, touched her, if she hadn’t scarred him. 

When she didn’t respond, he prompted her, “The rest of the story, Scheherazade.”

He leaned back, still over her, still looming and in her space and seeking answers from her, and she--relaxed into him. She felt shaky and her voice was going and she was placing herself in grasp.

There was no other place to go.

“He _wasn’t_ weak,” she said, “And when his heart was plucked from his chest like a ripe peach, the monsters ate it and only returned the stony pit to him. It wasn’t soft anymore and couldn’t beat and when the boy became a man, he took it out himself and threw it away.”

He exhaled harshly into the tendrils of hair at her temple and caught all the breaths coming from her throat against his palm. She felt him savoring them or hating them and she didn’t know how this would go anymore. 

What was she bargaining for if it was no longer about getting away from him? The Resistance wouldn’t want her back after she’d been kidnapped and compromised by all the Seed siblings, John and Jacob most of all. She didn’t have it in her to pick up the killing streak she had going into the hundreds now that she’d stopped.

“You--,” he began and then stopped himself, “The tale was enough, Scheherazade. You keep your head tonight.”

He was distancing himself again, but she wouldn’t let him. Wouldn’t let him pick and choose when he wanted to give himself and take himself away. 

“The story isn’t over,” she chided him, “I’m not finished, John, so lie back and think of England.”

His distant expression broke into laughter, a surprised pleasure crinkling around his eyes. He was so close to her face that when his mouth parted into a smile she almost felt dizzy. Too many things happening all at once, she supposed, happening at a pace he was more than accustomed to.

“God, if you’d just undo this goddamn knot,” she grumbled, her arms above her starting to tingle and fall asleep, “But we were talking about the boy’s heart. The boy who became a man and discarded what was left of it."

There was a silence between them nothing could fill until she gave him a smile of her own. He'd grinned at her and sneered at her and given her that delirious zealot's bared-tooth satire of happiness, but she'd never even pretended to reciprocate.

A barter still, though he didn't know it; he'd given her a genuine reaction. She could offer a small, real smile.

"Aren't you going to ask what else?" she asked him teasingly, could feel the curve of her closed mouth pulling into her cheeks.

There was nothing sneering about his expression as he simply drank in hers and dutifully--if sarcastically--responded, "What else?"

"I know a secret, John Seed.”

“A secret?” he asked.

“The secret is that it wasn’t destroyed. It’s just somewhere sleeping, resting, his pit-heart, waiting for him to unbury it,” she finished in her story-teller’s voice, showing him that she wouldn't back away from his soft spots. The bruises and the webbing between his fingers where she could see the scars of needles' track marks. She wished it was a more calculated move to be gentle on her part.

She wished this was just another way of killing someone.

He said nothing, all the expression his face had contained--humor and lust and anger and a softness she must have been imagining--was all gone.

He looked like Hades on his dark throne, judging souls. Poseidon calling the oceans to flood unlucky villages. Hephaestus staring down at the swords he would hammer into lethality. He had been excavating her for weeks, but she felt that she had taken a shovel and dug for this expression. Something too empty to be disingenuous; something true.

With a gentleness that defied everything she knew about him, he lifted himself off her and pulled her up the bed. Her clothes held a bit of dampness, especially her jeans, but she'd learned to put up with a lot during her time in the woods and just being on something that didn't require her to be in a seated position was heaven.

He pulled a threadbare blanket over her and settled her bound hands on her blanket-covered stomach. 

She asked, “What is this room?”

“Yours, now. Don’t give me a reason to throw you back into the pit,” he replied and it sounded ferocious as he tore himself away from her. She didn't expect him to say goodnight, but he didn't say a word as he turned away from her and stalked out of the room.

Juniper let out a long, shaky exhale.

She’d noticed that he’d never wiped off his hand. Had left the room with her clinging to his fingertips.

\--

Penny looked up from her sewing when someone knocked on the door. She had a feeling she’d be having a repeat visit sooner or later after John had directed her to attend to their newest recruit and prisoner. The girl had looked haggard but fierce with her thick eyebrows like dark slashes across a tan face made wan from captivity.

The Deputy had lit up at the sight of her and tried to stifle it, a confusing reaction made much clearer when she very easily realized through their interaction that the Junior Deputy missed company. How pitiful, she’d thought, looking at the bandage hiding John’s work on her arm, looking at the ropes twined around her like snakes. 

She’d seemed much more--honest....and yearning, than Penny had imagined the woman would be. The beast of the Resistance, spoken of in curses or in grief within Eden’s Gate, was little more than a thin girl way in over her head. Clearly missing home. Going downhill bound to a dingy chair in grungy little room.

Her unbound hair had been thick and curling and a little frizzy from neglect. She smelled like an animal in a stable, all musk and mindless sweating and perhaps, if Penny was being kind, the slightest hint of something more herbal. Like lavender.

Leaving her had left Penny more conflicted than she’d anticipated. Her role within John’s bunker was firmly as a seamstress who occasionally did administrative work for John’s various lawsuits. Penny had been a paralegal before her life with the Project and John wasn’t one to squander exploitable skills. 

With her expertise so far away from anything to do with his role as the Baptist, especially for the difficult cases, she’d been surprised the first time he stopped by to ask her to look after the Deputy.

But the second time was a little less surprising.

It was so early, it was basically still night when he found her. She tended towards cat naps rather than any regular sleep patterns. John was familiar with them, as she was with his own insomnia. He knew where she'd be at this hour when it was pitch black outside and the world was silent and watchful: in the community room doing some mending hours before the rest of the bunker would begin to wake.

The door was ajar and anyone could enter, but it seemed fitting that John Seed would take the time to knock. He entered looking sharp, in a suit with a white shirt buttoned up smartly to his neck. A small smirk curled on his mouth when he spotted her.

“Penny,” he said warmly, like they were old friends, “Just the woman I was looking for.”

He approached her and took a seat on the arm of a chair a couple feet away from her perch on the old den couch, crossing his ankles and intertwining his fingers together on his lap as he faced her. 

“Brother John,” she greeted him in turn, fighting the urge to curl her fingers into the fabric in her lap, “How can I help you?”

It was always how she greeted him--always how most people greeted him, by asking what they could do for him. Penny had no experience with how the other Seeds ran their regions, but in John’s there were simply so many tasks to complete that even a greeting was an invitation to be more productive. John always had a list of chores and tasks to be taken care of and had no compunctions in assigning them to other people.

_ Typical attorney_, she thought, mentally rolling her eyes. She’d worked for the same construction law firm for fifteen years before joining the Seeds and had in no way forgotten the ease with which all of her attorneys had delegated and tossed out demands, so sure no one would pipe up in protest.

On the one hand, it was certainly the way to keep a region together, by having everyone constantly contribute. On the other hand, Penny couldn’t help but be curious about the sort of operation John was running in comparison to his siblings. She had no interest in voicing her thoughts, but this was her home and it was unavoidable to think about its organization. 

John’s face turned warm and earnest, the smirk rounding out into something a bit softer. A handsome man, was John Seed, though she hadn’t been interested in romantic relationships for a couple of decades. She just noticed things, was a watcher by nature, and there was a lot to take notice of within the Project. Especially among the higher ranking leaders. 

With his false and open expression, he ordered her, “You’ll be attending the Junior Deputy again today. Prepare her food--whatever fruit we have on hand and some bread will do--and sanitize her tattoo. Let her see it, leave it exposed afterwards. Offer her a towel and a bowl of water to wipe off with. You will speak to her, gather what information you can and report back to me. I think she’ll like a familiar face,” he finished, a troubling light in his eyes.

She could spot a cat and mouse mind-fuck from ten miles away and John was barreling down the road with a look that spoke of all sorts of obsession. The Book of Joseph had been fairly educational in regards to John’s personality, and she through experience was familiar with how he moved through their camp and handled his business affairs and seethed sometimes, vibrating with a frustration and a single-minded intensity that had even his Chosen avoiding him. 

But from what she could tell, she’d lucked out with the Seed siblings in some ways. The one she’d been sidled with just happened to be looking for someone with her exact skill set and while they didn’t work very closely together, she kept some of his cases organized and was able to spend the rest of the time as quiet and thoughtful as she preferred her life to be. There was nothing of Faith’s drugged circus and Jacob’s prisoner of war camp.

When she’d been laid off after a solid fifteen years of loyal service, she hadn’t been able to make rent or her car insurance or buy groceries. She couldn’t go to the doctor. She’d had no family in the area and more importantly, any family well off enough to support her.

The Seeds had swooped in and saved her from homelessness. It made her grateful, made her cry sometimes when the Father gave his sermons in a storm of emotion and Bible verses. She’d grown up Christian and had kept her faith throughout her life and they allowed her an existence where she both didn’t have to be destitute, had solid meals, a community to call her own, and a church to nurture her soul.

What was a little bloodshed spilt in the name of a brighter future in comparison to all that?

Looking at John’s face, which was both younger and older than she could imagine him being, she knew exactly how grateful she was for their intercession at the lowest point of her life.

But it didn't make her stupid. Or blind.

_ You will speak to her, gather what information you can and report back to me. I think she’ll like a familiar face _, he’d said, micromanaging exactly what Penny’s interaction with the Deputy would look like. 

“Yes, of course, Brother John,” she said promptly, aware of her expected response. What it was supposed to be--always _ yes _. Yes, Brothers Seed and Sister Seed. Yes, Father. Yes, Baptist. 

There was a price for everything. 

“I trust you will be discreet,” he said, affecting a playful tone he clearly didn't mean, “Because if you aren’t...well, never mind that, you’re a smart woman, Penny.”

The chilling look in his eyes was something she’d always admired in a man. Something about the decisiveness about it, the idea that somebody had everything under control. It intimidated her, but it was comforting to someone whose existence had always been composed of simply scrounging a life together as best as she could until finally someone could set out before her the things she must do and the consequences for not doing them.

A cold comfort was still a comfort, after all.

“Yes, I am, Brother John,” she said.

He pushed up from his seated position and stood over her, scanning evaluating eyes over her while he mulled something over.

“Be wary of her. She's smart. She'll see right through any attempt to extract specific information. What I'm looking for is a successful conversation, a foothold to friendship,” he explained. 

He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as wild and mad as his brother’s Judges, and he was too goddamn smart to go down easy. Penny had spent most of her life following cowards because she didn’t have the influence or power to stand on her own. Hadn’t had the opportunity to hoard wealth or eat filet mignon or buy a pair of Louis Vuittons or have a working heater in whatever rundown apartment she'd been able to lease with her minuscule budget. 

It had been so long since she’d even thought about those things or actively wanted them. Looking at Brother John was such an odd thing, to see someone who would probably bleed money if you cut him, coming to Hope and living among everyone else. Biding his time. Sharpening his claws.

She could follow a man like that. She could take his terrifying, slavering will into her hands and make it so. The will of The Father...the will of the Baptist--there were divides and divisions of loyalty and John was right about her being smart. She saw the writing on the wall.

She was too smart not to see the Project's invisible delineations. Too smart not to choose a side before her indecision got her throat slit. Sometimes the perception from the bottom was clearer than at the top, and she’d lived in the gutters long enough to sense the need to pledge her allegiance to whichever monster was most likely to let her live.


	6. the mask that sighs like a woman even though a woman wears it

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Juniper dreams a memory, John and Joseph recall the unhealed grudge between them, and Penny attempts damage control.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Biblical quotes from Romans 5:3-4, Matthew 18:3, and 1 Corinthians 13:11 because Joseph and John are show-offs.
> 
> Nowruz is the Persian new year, the first day of spring. A mehmooni is a house party basically. Lots of food and dancing for all generations.
> 
> There is a reference to John previously torturing the deputy by pressing thumbtacks into her leg, a scene written in the prequel dryad, but noted here in case you're not into prequels.

There wasn't much to do but dream fitfully in his wake.

Juniper's eyes closed in exhaustion, river-water and river-silt and river-sins crusting her lashlines. She felt the wound of confinement worst then, when all she wanted was to pace the valleys and meadows of Hope, night wind in her hair and sweat at her temples. 

Instead, this. Instead, him.

Her active mind pulled her effortlessly into memory as exhaustion dragged her down, remembering the newness of captivity; her parched mouth and her bitten swollen tongue, the rope rubbing the pointed bones of her wrists like an angry endless itch, John's voice that sounded only like false, good things (hot chocolate, a shawl warding off a fall chill, the sweetness of March as Nowruz births the Iranian New Year) as he did his best to dismantle her.

She dreamed and it was like a memory in perfect replay--the first days of capture when she'd glared at him, spit at him. Juniper was another woman, then, who hadn't screamed her throat raw confronting his willful ignorance at the mouth of a river. Who hadn't treated him like one of her own, reading his past as if they were at a _mehmooni_ playfully reading palms and coffee grounds after a lavish dinner.

She was there again, in the first chamber so dank and suffocating. He was in front of her, dainty smears of blood on his hands like paint smears, and it was the second time he'd expressed genuine anger towards her. June's carnage crossing Faith's land into John's territory had been discovered evidently. 

So long ago. So long ago ago, she recalled stumbling Bliss-spun as a junkie as bodies came her at with killing intent and she'd done what she had to do. 

John hadn't been pleased with her body count. 

“Sixteen,” he'd begun flatly.

It almost hurt to look at him. She'd wished feverishly for windows, anything to stare out of and take her away from him. 

She licked her chapped lips, eyelashes fluttering as she asked, “Sixteen what?”

“Sixteen bodies found at the border to my Valley,” he responded scathingly as he turned to his workbench, grabbed a hammer, and flung it at the far wall where Hudson had once sat. The impact of it rumbled like a cannonball. 

She flinched hard.

“They were mostly Angels, I think,” she says, weary and unsure on account of how unwillingly high she'd been. She’d been surprised she hadn’t become an Angel herself that day.

“But not all of them.”

He struggled for composure and his reaction shook her, made her consider something Juniper was no longer sure of: to what degree he actually cared about the Project’s people and how that balanced with Joseph’s hungry demands for sacrifice. For his own demands.

“No,” she said plainly, “Not all of them.”

John lost all his coolness at her response, roared at the empty room and it was not a cry of grief but one that pulled all his frustration out of him in one, rippling note. He came at her and took her by the shoulders, shook her until her teeth rattled and the room followed a second behind her line of vision in a shimmering wave, before releasing her to snarl in her face.

Her composure, something she prided herself on, began to shatter as she watched him lose his. It was sifting through her fingers like sand. Panic--of pain, of the anticipation of pain, of the breach of her personal space, of noise she could not politely ask to stop, of John simply _seeing_ her--spiked sharp in her chest.

“Speak!” he commanded and slapped his hand over the thumbtacks wounds he'd inflicted on her thigh hours before. It elicited an anguished groan from her.

Watching, he did it again, like he wasn't sure she got his point the first time.

But when she went to reply he clapped a hot hand over her mouth.

“No,” he insisted, “Not what you’ve been doing. I mean, confess. Your sins can’t save us, deputy, but I can. I have all the tools right here to help you. Bridge the gap between us.”

He shook her again, so abrupt that she could practically hear some sense of stability snap inside her and her breathing quickly spiraled out of control.

Her actions since the Project had begun their holy war upon the county was as covert as possible. She approached on swift feet, she conquered, she liberated, and she fled. Maybe that was what made the Seeds want to bind her to themselves. Maybe her skittishness amused them in some way because they thought all of this was a game. Because they had their armies and she had to be her own army. 

A wind-up toy--twist her up and watch how she goes.

He grasped her shoulders and the tamped-down fear rose up and spilled, her mind a shaky mess. He was right in front of her, but she couldn't see him anymore.

Gasping shudders stacked on top of each other to bury her. She was an animal caught in a trap and there was no steady ground. He'd ripped it out from under her and even the humiliation of that break being witnessed could not keep her from trembling into a panic attack.

He was too close. John loomed over her until she felt there was no space in which she could exist. In which she could breathe. She heard nothing but a howling wind that was not there and John Seed's berating and unwelcome sermonizing.

He was speaking, rapturous, powerful, reciting, "Remember Romans 5:3, deputy. 'We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame.'"

_Shame_. 

He named it so easily, the coiled snake of it a writhing, sparking live wire in the pit of her stomach and the cold, shaded areas of her mind. The thing he was giving her. The thing she was being forced to ingest, one bitter taste at a time.

She fell upwards, sideways, _ down-down-down _ and never landed. Nauseous, she coughed. Did she looked like a wild, mad horse, she wondered distantly, did she look like she was dying at his ministrations or did she look far too alive?

He must have stopped shaking her, but she couldn't tell the difference because of the trembling in her limbs, the pins and needles in her toes and fingers, the numbness through her arms and legs, and the endless hyperventilation.

It hadn't occurred to her yet that though she could not control the damage, she could direct where the pieces of her went. What new shape they made. But at that time, in that room, she had only been very lost and made very small.

He'd ranted about oceans of pain, but he knew nothing of her life before the Seeds. He knew nothing, she was sure, about sunshine and sweetness and wounds that a person could cherish because they marked spaces filled by love. If only her mother could see her now--what she'd become, what she'd been forced into. 

Her vision became less fuzzy and the lodestone of her stability asserted itself. Her mother's voice. Yes, the red, curling ribbon of her accent. Reminding her of life outside Montana where she had a home and grew up safe, loved, normal. 

_ If it did not hurt, you would not know you were alive. And don’t you want to live? _ Bahar's voice asked tartly, as though her dead mom could even begin to understand the mess she was in.

Her breathing steadied. 

A masculine voice dragged back to the present, out of her head, where John Seed stared at her with a peculiar pensiveness in his expression.

He asked again, “Don’t you want to live, deputy?”

He had his whole hand pressed to the front panel of her throat, not a grip so much as a clasp. It was too delicate for a man like him; a man who only left graffiti in blood in the homes of his victims, a man who let her use the bathroom as he held her at gunpoint, a man who had stolen the tears from her bloodless face as she cried them.

And still, slowly--so slowly--the calluses on his palm caught at her skin while she heaved and eventually grew quiet. 

Gratefully, terribly, she grew quiet as a mouse.

And the dream that was a memory that was a nightmare continued.

-

After he left her, he couldn't sleep. 

He felt a longing that pulsed in the bite mark on his chest--and he felt fear there, too. 

Insomnia had plagued him through childhood into his twenties, but now only imposed on him like an old and unwanted friend whenever he had too much to think about. 

He could handle a great many tasks and duties, but things like yesterday's impromptu reunion were impossible to compartmentalize.

John and Scheherazade had _both_ been surprised when Joseph had casually emerged from the foliage like it was coincidence he'd driven forty-five minutes and then wandered through the forest near John's bunker to find them. He'd labored to conceal it, but to his near-omnipotent brother it must have been obvious.

Joseph was far more regimented with his schedule than someone might believe at first. To check in on John might mean John had completely lost his trust. He could not--would not--hide away in his territory without looking Joseph in the eye again as soon as possible to evaluate their relationship for himself. 

It was something that would have to be addressed and, after leaving Scheherazade with her constantly churning thoughts quieted and her body relaxed after having shuddered beneath his own and her voice having spoken in a cadence that belonged to a woman of myth still ringing in his ears, he returned to the not-quite-spacious rooms he kept within the bunker.

He sat in front of the mirror situated above his bedroom's desk with every light in the room on, looking into it until his face stopped being his face. Until it looked like someone else, older and colder than the child he'd never been but who continued to trouble him. Even after all this time.

His blue eyes from his mother, his jawline from his father. John knew he could have been their perfect child, had he been given half a chance in hell. 

Parents--they'd been an inescapable ruin. Children, he felt compassion for; for the child he had never been who was in such desperate need of it. The rage of helplessness seared him frequently, but a good look in a mirror reminded him that he'd become a man in the interim between then and now.

John sat peering into his own image and as ever he could feel himself being dragged out of bed by the hair to pray for forgiveness by ranting lunatics, the phantoms of childhood who inhabited his quiet. They reminded him of his mission to cleanse. They kept him from craving a needle too much. They made him reach for his books instead. 

And, a bit bewitched, for her as well.

The thought of her drew his eyes to his reflection's chest where the indent of her teeth gaped wet and red and open at him. He thought about digging his fingers into it, tearing it, ensuring the permanence of it. 

But he didn't. To do so would change her mark and interrupt its honesty. And how long had it been, he thought, since someone had been completely honest with him?

He stared at it for an amount of time he wasn't willing to admit to, wishing she'd given herself over to him even as he relished her decisive retreat from intimacy. Everything from her was gained through understanding, a push and pull that shoved Joseph out of his thoughts entirely as John's mind recalled the heavy sheet of her hair spread across his chest and shoulder as she leaned against him in the water, totally spent.

He could feel, as if it were happening even now, her breath against the injury she'd inflicted. 

Scheherazade had torn his flesh and it was statement of many things: _you will receive too_ and _I am not passive_ and _hear me or I will hurt you_.

John hoped she would turn herself over to their faith so that he could keep her. So that one day she could press her hand over the teeth marks and they would simply mean _mine_.

Finally pulling out his cell phone and seeing the time, he found his resolve because he needed to prepare.

He waited until he couldn't put it off any longer to shower, to wash her off him, and he styled his hair meticulously and dressed with a deliberateness that came from routine.

He disinfected and spread a bandage over his injury and button up his shirt to the neck, just one left undone.

Looking in the mirror again, he nodded. It was time.

John told himself he was put together enough to visit a prophet despite the horrendously early hour. It was 3:42 AM and he had not a moment to spare. 

The Father, too, had never kept regular hours. To be honest, it was one of the few things they'd always had in common. As a kid, Jacob slept like a rock, probably confident he could wake in an instant and wrestle a bear. Scrawnier kids like Joseph and Jacob slept light. That and a heavy-handed father meant they kept some fucked up hours.

He had no compunctions with taking advantage of the time to have a private meeting of sorts. It was an issue that Joseph saw fit to drop in on him years after they'd established transparent meeting times with each other. It was a deviation which worried him, especially in the face of the threat of his expulsion from...everything. 

From the whole world they'd built. A quieter voice inside of him whispered--no, from the world _h__e'd _built. 

He'd retrieved Penny from her mending to stay with his captive. They worked closely enough that he was aware of her own nontraditional sleep schedule. Once she'd realized he too had issues sleeping, she'd become consistent in her availability during the strange hours between midnight and dawn.

She was reliable that way--snatching cat naps during the day when she wasn't demonstrating a frightening efficiency in paperwork that kept her out of the Project's gruesome field work. She understood there was more to the Project's survival than sermons and gunfire.

She's reacted well to his request, reigned in any curiosity she might have felt. Simply nodded her acceptance and agreed to his terms to interact with Scheherazade. 

Her calm assurance that she would watch the deputy had him exiting the bunker in no time.

He climbed into his Ford F150 and drove straight past his territory lines, skimmed past Faith's crop fields, and into the heart of Eden's Gate: Joseph's small but heavily guarded sanctuary, which was just comprised of a disintegrating church and the shoddy huts of his personal followers and assistants surrounding it. 

Even this ridiculously early, Joseph's Chosen all come out of their dwellings as he pulled up to the gates and was waved through them.

When they greeted him beneath the nighttime flood lights surrounding Joseph's sanctuary, their eyes were cool as glass though their salutations were warm. There was a disconnect between John and Joseph's Chosen, as though underneath the deferential surface they did not like him very much.

He'd ignored them all--because they weren't important. They were specially curated cannon fodder as far as he was concerned and so he easily waved them off as he climbed the steps to the little church and, soft but firm, pushed open the arched double doors. 

The church stank of unwashed bodies and wood polish. His eyes took time to adjust to the candles burning along the walls.

Joseph was a dark figure in a pew at the front. The prophet turned quickly, catching his eye with an assessing gaze before standing and beckoning as he walked around the back of the alter and into his office. John could not tell if he was surprised or displeased. The Father could be so opaque that he seemed hardly human at times.

As John walked up the aisles, past pews stained with red and black, he steeled his nerves. When he entered Joseph's office, his brother was already facing him with a mild and inquiring expression.

“John,” said Joseph, almost on the verge of kind but missing by an inch, “It’s not often you surprise me with a visit. I would’ve cleared my calendar if I’d known you were coming.”

It was scolding warmth wrapped around a reproach, which was still more than John had ever received from the Duncans. He’d driven out to Joseph himself, taken the time to return the out-of-blue visit that had been gifted to him, and his reception was being greeted with underlying unhappiness.

The tone prodded at the banked fire of his temper.

“Just returning your welcome presence in my region, brother,” John said evenly, irritation brewing in him that he labored to bury. 

Buried like the heart in the fairy tale of his childhood. _ It’s just somewhere sleeping, resting, his pit-heart, waiting for him to unbury it, _she’d murmured, her skin heated and her voice thick. Her eyes transcending any darkness he knew, gleaming spills of a life she’d lived before him but could have no longer.

But it wouldn’t do to think of that now. 

Not now, when he was staring into the eyes of the brother who’d found him over a decade and a half ago. They were eyes he sometimes couldn’t quite remember the color of, so obscured now by the blighting yellow of his glasses.

He was trying to figure out if he was angry with Joseph or if he was despairing of Joseph's keen gaze. It was a feeling he couldn't remember being without. 

“Fair enough, brother, and may you go by the grace of God,” he said, “Did you have something you wanted to discuss with me? Perhaps our wayward deputy?”

John knew a follow-up when he heard one. His brother hadn’t forgotten her dressing down of his character the day before. Joseph, much like himself, never forgot a slight. 

“I took her to the river to cleanse her sins,” he reported, wincing internally at how cowed he sounded, how soft his voice, “And so she was lowered into the water. She came out of it calm, quiet as a lamb.”

There was a kernel of guilt in his heart, that he’d stripped the experience of its uniqueness, her own desperate cleansing of him, and he knew from years past--knew the way he’d hid nearly all his books beneath his bed away from his adoptive parents as a teenager--that he was hoarding the truth of her from his brother. His Father.

That to his brother, unforgiving of what he considered conditional loyalty, this was a lie and a betrayal. 

But he’d spent his entire life compartmentalizing, his body which had been whipped and beaten at home and which moved as if unencumbered by abuse during the day at school even as he winced his way through games of dodge ball and soccer and debate team. 

_ This one shall reach the Atonement. Or the Gates of Eden shall be shut to you, John_, came the smooth and damning voice of Joseph through his head like a cold wind. 

What did it matter what had transpired between himself and the deputy if she turned completely? If she heeled for him, not the Project, she still gave herself to their side. She had promised him.

“That’s what we want, John,” Joseph nodded approvingly, “Though she must be open to Eden in its entirety. As must you, my precious disciple. ‘I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.’” 

John felt a stab of heat in his chest, the sharp tongue of anger.

This was where they always seemed to find the knotted thing between them. Where Joseph condescended to him and where John seemed to oscillate between abashed and annoyed by the implication, the _ constant needling _implication, that John was unsuited to salvation. 

That he was incapable of achieving a higher state of being, despite the human screams that had been completely dragged out of him to push him into such a state during all the years no one had laid a heavy hand on Joseph. And John always thought, _ Who are you to tell me the very things I was raised in? That you were not taught after our father’s house? The bible verses nearly branded into me? _

And Joseph always seemed to know, even before John responded, when that banked fury would reach out of him like a closed first seeking a target. 

Since the Father’s chastisement at the river, John had been ashamed and apologetic and regretful in turns and he had taken the deputy as per the prophet’s order. He’d left her body largely unharmed while he attacked her mind from all angles, because Joseph commanded it of him. He’d wiggled into her traumatized mind and made his bed right next to the memory of her fucking _ mother _and the things he felt for her--the way he burned for her--were an enormous expenditure on his part. 

All this and more he had done, and now he was being told that he must make himself and the deputy equal in their devoted childishness.

As if John had not been made to recite Bible verses while his hair was ripped out by the root. As if it was Joseph and not sobbing, snotty, pathetic John who had been baptized in his own blood and bile on the hardwood floors of the Duncan estate.

And more, Joseph demanded. And more and more, but less of you, Joseph demanded. And John struggled to do it, but then John had always struggled to give _ less _of himself. 

His voice had seized with pressure he quoted back, “‘When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’ The Bible is not your exclusive source material, Father.” 

Joseph’s eyes flashed, impenetrable, boiling, “I do not ask for much, John, only that you reign in your less compassionate impulses and step into the future with the ability to protect instead of destroy.”

And it was bizarre, but all he felt was anger and all John saw was Scheherazade's lovely, tan face, her cutting words as she told him how much indiscriminate carnage everyone in Eden’s Gate had caused, how much she’d witnessed while roaming the county. 

His particular brand of causing pain was immediately visible to an observing third party, but his cruelty was not particularly special when one considered all the bloodied empty campsites all over the forests and hills, the shells of homes and their gaping windows where people once lived. All of Faith’s Angel’s. Jacob’s Cook, incinerating families and feeding the dead, dear flesh to their children. 

They’d been in Hope County long enough to leave deep, gaping wounds all over it. Why was it him alone who needed to be a champion of the cause _ and _have a heart of gold when it did not seem to matter what was in anyone else’s? 

But he wanted the future Joseph had set out for them. The one he’d paid for in sweat and funds, the one he was still paying for. 

He looked down, voice struggling and gritty, “Yes, Joseph. Yes, Father.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Joseph said and his voice was hard, the enamel of enlightened preacher stripped from his face, “Right after you killed _ her_. Your agreement means little. I want results. Obedience.”

Joseph was bringing up an old scar between them. He should have known it would rise to the surface, the way it circled back to this every time they fought.

John laughed, bitterer with every moment he spent in his brother’s company, “And you’ll never get past that. I killed her because it needed to be done. She was getting out of hand. You chose badly, but don't worry, no one's perfect.”

Lost momentarily to temper, Joseph stepped closer, crowding him against the large desk at the back of the room. Joseph placed his hands upon John's shoulders and squeezed. Hard as stone, unyielding, a little of the wiry strength in him coming out.

“I chose who the Voice chose and you questioned me. You proved to be disloyal the instant your faith was tested. Doubting, witless, unbridled John,” he ground out and the air around them felt shaky. 

John couldn’t tell if he was hanging his head in apprehension or anger, but he’d spent enough time with his knees on the hard floor to know they could be completely intertwined, indistinguishable from one another, pushing his mouth back open to pull holy hell on top of him. 

Joseph was the one bringing their early days in Hope up, but John would see the conversation through. Deferential or not, he would chase the lit flame until it burned him. It was simply his nature.

“The first _ honorable _ Faith Seed killed a child,” John sneered, “And she had no place among us after that. Jacob runs his soldier camp, but I’m your enforcer. You lay out edicts and I make sure they become law in the minds of our people. But when you’re fucking someone, you don’t really want to hear that, do you?”

He was shoved sideways and let himself fall, catching himself against the wall of Joseph’s office a couple feet away from the desk. It didn’t hurt, but it didn’t have to. 

“I could have saved her,” Joseph hissed at him, ignoring the accusation, “I could have saved her and you took away her chance for rebirth.”

Even now, John could easily call up the image of the woman who'd seduced their leader years ago. The woman who was the very reason the role of Faith Seed existed. It had been created.

For her.

The first Faith Seed had been a redhead. She’d been slender as an elk and soft spoken--much more soft spoken than the current Faith--and she was an addict who consistently used beyond her limits. After she'd been given the job of growing and refining Bliss, the drug that was her responsibility became her master.

It ate at her sanity until she'd snapped...and he'd killed her. 

She’d lured children into the Henbane river one September afternoon a year into her reign as a Seed and managed to drown one in a mad, sky-high stupor before John got to her.

At first he had come to confront her because he’d heard she’d begun to baptize, something he alone had been tasked with by the Father. He’d been driven to her region bolstered by the possessive, selfish need to defend his place within their community. _His_ tasks laid out by the Father. What value _he_ held to his long lost family and their hard earned future. 

He’d never forget the day. As he'd driven up and parked on the bank, the sun had been fading fast as was typical near the beginning of the cold season. The water was getting a too frigid to justify cleansings in the river. And Faith Seed should have known better than to capitalize on John’s role. 

She'd been getting bad for a while before that awful day.

Her presence in his brother’s bed was not his place to question, but he couldn’t help but notice that what came with her quiet beauty was a growing sense of entitlement. That she’d begun tucking the Bliss flowers into all her pockets, encroaching on John’s sobriety anytime she came near. She was always elevated on the Bliss, floating then flying then soaring.

They’d known so little about the Bliss then, much too little to understand dosing limits without more formal, scientific testing.

It was one thing to manufacture a drug that might ease the transition from this ugly, wretched world and into their vision of living, and it was entirely another to insist with nary a word that everyone around her be just as high as she was. The flower was so powerful that the perfume it emitted could affect people close to it and she must have been sewing pockets on the insides of her clothes for the pungency she carried with her to make people drop at her feet like beggars.

Even for him, it was sick.

It was a lot for John to acclimate to, not sequestered up in the mountains like his eldest brother, experimenting on wildlife and tending to the men and women ensconced in their cages that would serve as perfect soldiers should they survive. Jacob was creating weapons; he could not be bothered.

It was John who had to watch as the woman who’d discarded her name had become Faith Seed, badly. She made sure to defer to the Father when there was an audience, but had no consideration for anyone else once the addiction of Bliss took root in her hungry mind, though she’d never lost her sweet, closed-mouthed smile. 

She’d worn the same smile when he’d parked at the lip of the Henbane River and Faith had lifted her heart-shaped face away from the small, limp body she’d held in her arms. Children were playing around her in the water, splashing like water nymphs, laughing and flinging water at each other. They must have been much too high not to realize that what their chaperone held in her arms was one of them, a corpse of innocence, one small bare foot dangling, the pale toes submerged in the chilly, choppy water.

“Baptist,” she’d greeted him respectfully even as she tried to wrestle his job away from him in her milky, delicate arms, the feathery tips of her auburn hair ruddy where they skimmed the river’s surface, “I’ve claimed one for Heaven. He was too sweet for what’s coming. I sent him back home.”

Children, he'd always felt compassion for, especially after having been one who'd never received any. The vision of that limp body and her smiling face struck him like an arrow.

John had felt his vision blur, as the body swayed in her arms, and for the first time since they moved he felt like he was living in a nightmare. That everything that had come before this, the senseless beatings and religious fervor, had somehow led to Hope County. To Joseph’s insane mistress. 

His vision bled into a dark static, before he threw himself at her and didn’t come up for the air of consciousness for what seemed like hours. When he had, she’d been dead and he'd dragged her to his truck and laid her and the child's bodies up in the passenger seat. All the confused, crying children had been rounded up on the truck bed. He'd driven without seeing the road, consumed by rage, and in no time he’d arrived at Joseph's church to fling her at the Father’s feet. 

He’d never been forgiven. He’d never brought himself to truly apologize for it, either, deferring to Joseph in so many other ways, making himself softer and smaller in his presence. Trying to be less than he was, trying to be more manageable. More tame.

But he would not apologize. Not for her death.

_I could have saved her and you took away her chance at rebirth, _Joseph had hissed at him like a curse.

_ Why can’t you just accept that you’re pissed off your big brother isn’t going to let you into heaven after all these years on a technicality? _Scheherazade shrieked in his head as she pummeled him at the water’s edge. 

And Joseph, years and years later, bringing up the wicked dead.

“She took away her own chance. She told me the children were too pure to live as she held the corpse. The Bliss had destroyed her mind,” John sneered. 

“That’s why I found someone with a higher tolerance,” Joseph said coldly, “but I wouldn’t have had to if you’d been able to control yourself.”

“It’s been ten years,” John replied, sensing the ancient argument would run in circles for hours if they let it, “And we have problems at hand. How is the renovation of your home going? Do I need to find a new contractor?”

Joseph’s face tightened the way it always did when he had to remember that John had the money he needed to keep his vision alive.

“We do have a problem at hand,” Joseph said loftily, “But it has little to do with my accommodations. I was willing to look the other way with your Scheherazade, but now I believe I should ask what actually happened with her. You look like a man who indulged in fleshly delights, John, and it’s disgusting to be near.”

John was hardly ever surprised and the bald accusation wasn’t enough to elicit a widening of eyes. He wasn’t the sort to spook easily. Though he hated being called out by the man who--at the end of the day, no matter how long it was--had saved him utterly and completely from ruin. The ruin of the festering rot inside him, uncollared. Allowed free reign over his soul. 

He needed the chains. 

He needed the discipline. He needed the punishment and ultimatums. 

He had killed the first Faith because it had to be done, but he had been so terribly disappointed in how he’d taken her life, in a black veil of fury. It had been murder and he’d done it in front of the other children. He’d taken someone who had comforted the Father after the death of his wife. 

He knew who owned him. He knew, despite his temper. Despite his defiance. 

And yet, the bite on his chest concealed by his shirt stung suddenly.

“Father,” he began, subdued, but Joseph raised a palm to halt his speech. He closed his mouth.

Joseph was pulling the preacher back on, their relationship as brothers receding as it had to in the face of their glorious vision of Eden. One John would like very much to enter, preferably with one hand clasped around Scheherazade’s wrist.

“No, John,” Joseph said, “She has made you a promise; I know this. I cannot tell what it is, only that she will disappoint you. Women are such deceptive creatures. But we need her, the Voice tells me, and you have quieted her beyond what I thought possible. She is no longer cutting a bloody path through our people. I know who I have to thank for that.”

John felt that little thrill, the shining light of praise, not meager after an entire conversation of Joseph’s revulsion but momentous because he could still feel it for John. Even after John continually proved himself unworthy. 

Joseph kept up his palm, as if anticipating and halting even John’s gratitude. He closed his eyes in thought as John stood, basking in praise and leaning against the wall he’d been shoved into. 

“Do not trust her, my child,” Joseph warned him, concern shining in his eyes, “Keep her, teach her, punish her, even love her as you must to convert her, but do not trust her.”

John only bowed his head, said nothing. Joseph didn’t want him to speak. John did not want to speak either.

Not about her.

On his way out the door, to leave Joseph to his writings and contemplation, the Father called out, “And call your eldest brother sometime. You know he worries.”

\--

She blinked awake slowly, her nightmare-memory sloughing off her like snow from a swaying branch. She’d always thought it amazing, what could lie beneath a veneer of calm, that even as she woke with a placid face her heart was pounding with fear. 

Juniper didn’t remember falling asleep the night before--whatever twilight hour John had left her--and it hardly mattered since time was of no consequence to someone without a phone or a calendar or a schedule outside of John Seed’s whims.

An image pulled itself from the brackish rivers of memory which ran through her, breaking the surface of black water and denial (because when had she ever been good at it, denial, even when her parents were plucked from her life like ripe blackberries off the vine, even when she would be better off boxing it all up), of his blunt fingers nudging, slick but careful, inside of her. The catch of callus against tender, pink flesh. 

She’d wanted him, his foul, false joviality and the dark thing beneath it and that sharp mind unsheathed. Did she want him still, having come through the other side of what had never before amounted to anything more than phantom lovers in the dark of her bedroom? 

How did he measure up to Scheherazade’s King Shahryār? How did he measure up, when he pushed all his attention to detail and scathing intensity onto her, stroked his fingers inside her like he was beckoning her gasping pleasure from the center of her body to the palm of his hand?

And what, since the end of Hope had begun, was becoming of her? Her neck grew hot and her throat tight. Yesterday had pushed the limits of her emotional capability, had torn her open and cauterized her in the fleeting time between sunrise and sunset. John--she'd screamed herself raw and she'd maimed him like a feral dog and she'd found quiet in a bartering surrender.

_ I let him touch me. _

A noise to her left jolted her. Someone was in the room. Possibly had been in the room for hours.

She turned her neck, cheek resting against a flat pillow, to see Penny meet her wary stare. The woman’s stern countenance was firmly in place as she hemmed a shirt beside the lumpy bed Juniper might dare to call her own. 

June tried to shake off the fuzzy memories of sixteen murders. Tried to shake off John. But the ghosts of Eden’s Gate, she was learning, clung fast to her spirit. 

Penny merely commented, “Hm, bad dreams? You’ll fit right in,” and returned to her needlework.

“What time is it?” asked June.

“4:45 AM, much earlier than I’d expected a young person to wake up,” was her dry answer.

“Well, I’ve heard it said that war changes people,” June replied quietly, her chest airy and empty as it always felt in the face of her cooling, raw panic. 

And she was in a war: the bombs, the skidding cars carrying shooters aiming out of broken windows, the ghost towns, the bloodied campsites like sick warnings among the Montana wilderness, and John’s voice. 

John’s voice was murmuring at the back of her thoughts, _ Focus, Scheherazade. Focus on me, _ like he deserved her any of her unblinking attention. How she'd promised him all of it.

“So it does,” Penny nodded. The woman tied off a line of stitching with a perfectly executed knot and set down her project in a hand woven basket at her feet. 

It reminded Juniper of a grandmother’s craft basket, though the dingy, dirty walls surrounding them ruined the image. 

John’s bunker had a way of taking a thing and making it spare, and sparse, and skeletal. It had a way of taking people that Juniper knew--just absolutely knew--used to be real, emotional beings looking to make their way in the world, same as anyone, and turning them into something hollow. 

Hollow soldiers, hollow bullets--those were the descriptions that came to mind, but they felt so shallow. They didn’t encompass all the things June had seen out in the county, the empty campsites smeared in blood and graffiti, the ghost towns with a mockery of mannequins left in the absence of the living. 

It had disgusted her then. It still did. And she’d let John Seed fuck her; with his fingers, with his eyes. Had willed it even, longed for it. 

From the basket where she’d abandoned the shirt, Penny withdrew a pistol, clean white cloth, saline solution, and Aveeno’s eczema cream. A part of June perked up at the items, knowing without having to think too hard that her mystery tattoo would soon be revealed. 

She felt like she’d gone so long without knowing what the image was beneath her semi-frequently changed bandages that she was almost looking forward to the unwilling mark upon her. 

Penny scooted her chair right beside June on the bed, her hands and her feet tied together at the wrists and ankles but otherwise unbound, and leaned forward to take her forearm in hand. She had tucked her pistol into the front of her pants in a silent threat to behave.

“He told me this was the beginning of a tapestry,” Juniper said, sedate, contemplative, in desperate need of companionship, “But so far it’s just been another secret.”

“You’ll find a lot of those here, deputy, it’s true,” the other woman said, “But there might also be other things, if you were willing to look for them.”

“Like what?” June asked as Penny quickly undid the rope at her wrists, placed a soft hand on her forearm and gently twisted so the vulnerable wrist and inner forearm were revealed, bandage in place. 

“Truths,” murmured Penny, using her other hand to pick at and peel away the white bandage.

June held her breath, exhaled out shakily as she saw what John had done. 

It was a small dagger, the subtle blade curving sleek and sensual as the sloping line of a hip. The crossguard and pommel were rounded slightly and the handle was decorated with a floral mosaic design Juniper found distinctly Middle Eastern. That had been the day, she remembered, when they'd first spoken of _One Thousand and One Nights_.

It was unwillingly received and it was skillfully given and it was a part of her, would remain a part of her, until the day she died.

This tattoo was clean lines and smoke-curls of blade and petite Damask roses--yes, he had branded her. It seemed that was all he did, the blade right above her dominant hand which could make anything into a weapon and his voice in her head and his touch on her body.

Penny, too, appeared overwhelmed. She was a quiet woman, one who kept her thoughts to herself, but the woodenness in her expression communicated an undercurrent of shock. It was smoothed away quickly, but she’d caught it. 

Juniper’s voice shook, sounded too much like a child’s when she said, “He’s branded me with this war, so I’ll see it everyday.”

Her mother’s voice and her father’s presence were absent this morning, like he’d knocked everything out of her head but himself. It angered her. It infuriated her. She kept trying to figure out how they’d gotten to this point--what was planned and what had surprised the both of them. 

“Child,” Penny said, spooked, “He hasn’t merely branded you. He has elevated you.”

Hot air filled her lungs. She dared to comment, “That sounds unsettling.”

“You don’t understand,” Penny observed, hazel eyes flicking over her analytically, “Of course, you don’t. You’ll kill us in droves, but you don’t understand how things _ work _ here.”

“You’re part of an insane cult. It can’t be that complicated. As far as I can tell, you just wait for Joseph to decree something and then follow it like little lost sheep,” replied Juniper. 

Penny ducked her head to hide her reaction from June. With a gentleness Juniper did not understand, she began to clean and moisturize the dagger, a bit red but generally looking healed. 

“Ah, yes,” the woman said with her attention on the tattoo, “Your first exposure to the Project was at Joseph’s stronghold. It’s made up his most devoted and personally chosen followers. They are...zealous, in their love of the Prophet. There is no other way to put it: they follow him slavishly.”

June was entranced with the cleaning of her tattoo, the barely-there swipes of moisturizer and the non-violent intent, and took her time to think about Penny's words. She did not agree with Penny's unspoken insistence that not everyone was an insane, gun-toting zealot, but there was more to consider than just fighting.

She pursed her mouth in thought and offered, “You make it sound like there are...divisions. Between the Seeds.”

“In an operation this large scale, does that surprise you?”

June said nothing, staring at the woman in front of her in her simple, neutral colored clothes. Hand sewn. Hand washed. A prim, austere wardrobe that gave the impression of great repression of thought and didn’t add up with the clear, calm conversation happening between them.

“People are always complicated,” chided Penny, “Whatever you may think of them.”

“Not all of them,” June said without hesitation, her head full of the idiots among the Project who shot without looking, without aim, and without discretion, “Don’t feed me your rhetoric.”

Penny’s jaw clenched as she conceded, “No, not all of them. But _ think_. The people you should keep your eye on, the important cogs in this machine, they are complicated. Losing sight of this is small minded and conceited. It’s probably what got you captured in the first place.”

She ignored the reactive burst of anger, determined not to get lost in an argument when an insider was offering valuable intel for unknown reasons. June forged ahead, hardly cognizant of when Penny was done with the cleaning and refrained from putting on another bandage with instructions that it needed to "air out from now on." 

“Believe me, I’m well aware that the Seeds have enough issues to stock a Great Depression-era orphanage,” June returned evenly, “But organizations like this aren’t all that complicated when you get down to it--unless it becomes divided, which you appear to be implying.”

“It’s not just implication,” Penny denied firmly, touching June again to re-tie her wrists together securely, “Financially speaking, who is running this organization, deputy?”

She jogged her own memory. Jacob: did not have an interest in money, but in physical power and experimentation. He was a military leader and military leaders wanted action and funding, were not typically interested in the bureaucracy of funds distribution itself. 

Faith: was a woman with the mentality of an emotionally stunted teenager. She was an addict caught in a suspended fantasy Joseph chose to cage her in. She was powerful, but she was not practical or capable. She was constantly high, kept docile through drugs and through the responsibility of the spiritual journeys of new initiates. 

Joseph: a true prophet-figure, though she’d never run into any others. He seemed it, though, with his showy asceticism. He put so much effort into his presentation, his image of a man humbled by a holy power only he could discern. His concerns were not earthly. 

He was a little like Faith--or Faith, actually, was a little like him--able to focus on the emotional manipulation of his followers...while someone else, the last option available, took care of the boring details like labor compensation, land deals, agricultural planning, electricity bills, people clothed and fed, Jacob’s labs stocked, buildings maintained, permits obtained, Joseph’s church in repair, and everything else entailed with keeping a group comprised of hundreds, maybe a couple thousand (she couldn’t be sure since they were so goddamn spread out), people alive and surviving across an entire county. 

No wonder, June thought, stunned, no wonder half of the land had gone to shit if one person was being forced to consider all of that all the time. No wonder someone would have to make a list of priorities and go down it slowly while lesser concerns fell to the wayside. All the ghost towns, all the abandoned disaster zones, all the fucking messes--in this context, they all made sense.

And one person. One person in control, though he himself was kept under heel so he wouldn’t think to keep rising.

“Oh,” she breathed, incredulous, “That’s ridiculous.”

“Isn’t it just,” Penny replied, “But it’s interesting how that causes fissures. And how people gravitate to their own interests.”

Juniper asked, reeling but curious, “And yours is?”

“Surviving,” Penny answered, “No matter what happens. If it’s the end of the world, John will have enough knowledge of the land to lead. If it’s not, he’s the only one who can engage with the outside world and win.”

Floored, June had absolutely nothing to say. Except.

“What in the world is possessing you to tell me this?” she asked.

Penny tapped a finger on the deceitfully lovely dagger.

“The one thing that truly connects all of us is the ritual mortification of sin into flesh. He doesn’t give us images. He carves sins we must face head on like demons. He doesn’t deal out symbols. I don’t know what this makes you, but I do know it makes you different.”

June remained silent, thinking and considering, churning over the flood of information. It changed things. It changed the way she looked at Eden’s gate, as if before she’d only been looking at a painting and now she was inside of it, made real.

There was a long pause before Penny spoke again.

“How much do you know about the Faiths?”

“Like, Faiths as in the women who have taken on the role of Faith Seed?”

At Penny’s brief nod, Juniper continued, “Not much. She captured me. Almost made me OD at least twice, and something about that flower makes me feel like she can astral project, but I know that's the drugs talking. As far as her predecessors...absolutely nothing. Like they didn’t leave an impression at all.”

Penny scoffed.

“Of course they did. If they hadn’t, people would talk about them more. The Faith before the current incarnation killed herself. There’s a lot of speculation as to why, but it seems like the Bliss was eating her from the inside out. But it’s the first Faith who’s really fascinating.”

“What about her?”

“Well, she was murdered, to start with. And John Seed’s the one who killed her.”

The pause between them was loaded. Rife with a tension that thickened in the silence. John Seed murdering someone wasn’t shocking to her. But his murder of a herald...if that was even true.

Paranoia surged again, stronger.

Penny had been feeding her an awful lot of sensitive information. Wasn’t she supposed to be a disciple of, if nothing else, John Seed?

June’s eyes sharpened, shuttered, knew they grew openly distrustful, “Again, why would you tell me this?”

It was a question she couldn’t stop asking.

Penny answered without hesitation, “Because even if you don’t trust me, you’d be stupid not to listen anyway. John Seed is a leader I’ll follow into death or the new world, whichever comes first, but your presence here is a wild card. Unpredictable. A distraction to him. I’d be stupid to not tell you what small truths I can because you might as well make informed decisions. You're a human wrecking ball who will eventually be in a position to make decisions that change everything.”

"You continue to believe that?" June asked, face lowering to her bound and prostrate body. She didn't even know if _she_ believed that anymore. 

Penny directed her attention back to mending the shirt and made a few quick stitches, then paused to pin her with her unhappy, unwavering gaze.

"I do," she replied.


End file.
